Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Improvising

Well, after twenty years of marriage, Karen has finally corrupted me in the kitchen.

After all that time being the master of dishes requiring precise measuring, temperature, and time, like rice, cookies, and bread, I have now created something completely out of my head. The kitchen may never be the same.

The dish was a simple potato soup. I took eight or nine potatoes and peeled and cubed them. I stuck them in a pot with enough water to cover them and a bit of salt and boiled them for 15 minutes. Then I added more water and let it simmer for about an hour. Then I added more water, milk, and some pepper. I chopped up some frozen brocolli (which nobody in the house would eat because I accidentally got chopped instead of florets) in a food processor and dumped that in. I grated a few ounces of leftover cheese and dumped that in. Then I added celery salt and garlic and chopped onion, and left it all boil down for awhile while I made grilled cheese sandwiches.

And it was good! This could have a serious influence on my style of cooking. This could be really, really dangerous. I could get used to this.

What made it even funnier was that I had just finished reading The Tale of Despereaux as a bedtime story to William and Daniel. If you don't know the story (which was made into a pretty bad movie just recently), one of it's key plot points is that the King, after his wife dies of shock when a rat falls into her soup, rashly outlaws soup and anything involved in the making or eating of soup. And as it turns out, soup is what finally saves the day.

Soup certainly has saved me from being chained to a recipe. I just hope all of my culinary adventures have such a happy ending.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

A New Look for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day. Well, here is the new Web site! It looks a lot different, as you can see, but it is also a new site under the hood.

You will notice some things missing, like captions and the archives, but they're not gone for good; I just need to work out some design issues. You'll see things changing several times as I play around with concepts. I hope it's not too disconcerting.

One of the reasons I built this new site, aside from wanting to learn a few things, is to make it easier to make changes in the site. I can change backgrounds and move things around far more easily with the new design. I think not too far into the future, we're going to have a little bit of fun with art from the kids.

Tonight is a Valentine's Day at home, so I have a few decorating tasks to do with the boys. Hope you'll keep up with the site; it's going to be fun.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Warming, But Not a Trend

Today brought spring-like weather to New England; the temperature went over 50 here today, and a lot of the snow and ice on our driveway melted. It's enough to make you think that spring is coming early, but not so fast! The cold is returning for the weekend, though not as deep a cold as we've experienced recently.

But, short-lived as this warm spell will be, it did give me a chance to work outside without freezing my fingers off, and I took advantage of that to install the balusters on my temporary back deck and stairs. I even managed to stay ahead of the little bit of rain that came along in the afternoon.

Some changes are coming to the Web site in the near future. It's actually an educational experience for me; I'm trying to apply some new techniuqes I've learned. I hope the result will be a Web site that's more fun to look at and easier to use. I'm also collecting all of the Pictures Of the Day starting this week and putting them into an ever-growing Picasa gallery, which I will post sometime tomorrow.

Right now I have to post the pictures to the actual Web site so that I can get off to bed.