Thermostats
September 27, 2008
This past weekend I replaced all of our old-school thermostats with brand-new programmable thermostats. This is Something-You-Can-Do-Yourself. (But first turn off the power to the furnace or boiler). There were several surprising things that I learned about thermostats:
- There was a humongous blob of mercury in the Old Thermostats that really scared me (I tend to drop things)
- The new thermostats, even if I never end up programming them, and even with their constant digital readout, are a lot better looking than the old thermostats; I would’ve thought it’d be the opposite, considering how I like that retro look
Actually that’s only two surprising things.
So, step two is to wait for a cold day, and then (with the thermostats set at a constant 68 degrees) chart hourly temperatures at each thermostat all day long. If you know me you just shrugged when you read that. The thrill is in the charting and tracking, and the puzzle! The puzzle is: how do you program a programmable thermostat if you have both radiant heat and some solar heating.
Finn’s Green Sweater
September 26, 2008
In April, I started knitting. My friend Paul has theorized that the proliferation of new knitters has to do with the bad economy, and he may be right. But knitting is not necessarily inexpensive. Particularly if you really love yarn, because nice yarn is not cheap! And I’m told that if you end up getting really into knitting, it’s because of the yarn.
The first things I knit (a scarf and a matching red hat) were knitted in icky feeling acrylic yarn that I got at a hobby store. The next thing, a top-down raglan sweater for Finn, was knitted with cotton fleece – ahhhhh, that is nice to knit with.
It took three months to knit that sweater, but I have produced an actual article of clothing that can be worn. And here’s the thing: it looks so much better than kids’ clothes that you can buy. For one thing, I wanted a wide neckline because Finn has kind of an enormous head for a three year old (and three year olds have enormous heads in general in proportion to their bodies), And I wanted a ribbed neckline and sleeves and hem. And it’s soft. And it’s a nice color. Not a pastel baby color or an overly-enthusiastic color that screams “I’m a kid!” And it’s not striped, and it doesn’t have Winnie-the-Pooh on it.
Now, I spent all of $27 on the yarn (and I even have some left over), but if you count my time (and I’m giving Finn a cut rate of $75/hour), this is a $6027 sweater.
Hakuna Crostata (apologies to The Lion King)
September 25, 2008
I’m not an incredibly keen cook. I get distracted, wander off, and tend to boil over, burn or otherwise mess things up. But I really love good, simple food, and a few times I’ve gotten very attached to a particular food, from a particular region - food that you just can’t find in New Mexico.
This is how the story of the Crostata begins… David and Finn and I were in Italy in 2007, in an area called Le Marche. You haven’t heard of it? A lot of people haven’t heard of it, which is exactly why it’s so great. I could go on and on about Le Marche, but that’s another topic. One of the great things about Le Marche is the food, and one of the great foods of Le Marche is the crostata. In Italy they eat basically the same things everywhere, but each region cooks them in a slightly different way.
I’d been to other places in Italy and eaten crostata, and crostata is always nice, but I have never eaten an entire crostata by myself and I’ve never had to go home to try to recreate a crostata before I ate the Crostata from Carassai.
When we returned home in May, utilizing recipes on the internet, I made a crostata that was a like a dry shortbread cookie and tasted like flour. Bleh.
That was that. And then we returned to Le Marche in 2008, to the same town. The day after we arrived was market day in Montalto, and we bought two of those Carassai Crostate and ate them both immediately. I saved the label. We went to Carassai (a few towns over the hills) and tried to find the bakery (Porra Bruno) but couldn’t find it. But I had the ingredients list, and I knew that NOW I would be able to have crostata in New Mexico.
So when I got home I tried again. I have a made a spreadsheet, with all of the ingredients and the amounts of each ingredient I used in each attempt. I won’t tell you how many times I tried before I asked my friend Michaela (who is from Perugia) call the bakery on her skype phone to find out exactly how much flour, how much sugar, etc. With the sort of sketchy instructions from the bakery (they explained that they were artisans, so you just put in “some” lemon zest and “some” vanilla and “enough flour to make a soft dough”) I went back into the kitchen… and made a crostata!!! A wonderful, artisinal crostata at 7,000 feet above sea level!
Now that I can make crostata, we eat it a lot. And it’s cheap, cheap, cheap to make! If you email me, I’ll send you the recipe.
