crafty_packrat | Recent Entries

Had

greenygal and Euterpe over for conversation and brunch -- Liège waffles, slab-cut bacon, and springerle cookies -- this morning. I gave them their Christmas gifts, which I still had because I'd been sick for 2 weeks and couldn't really see anyone.

Thick-slice bacon, a dozen eggs, bacon-gruyere wheel, spinach pastry, lemon tart, rosemary pull-apart rolls, gingerdoodle cookies, a quart of chicken & dumpling soup, a quart of pickled red onions, cranberry chevre, farmhouse goat cheese, apple cider, apples (Nittany, Braeburn, Stayman), shallots, red onions, garlic heads, white turnips, grilled spiced olives, Greek country mixed olives, and a pound of black beans.

I talked briefly with an elderly woman who had just moved into the area and was attending the market for the first time -- she was trying to find organic apples. I don't think you can really grow apples here as a market farm organically. There are just too many critters that love to chomp on apples here, but I hope she finds something she is willing to buy.

I plan to make another apple-shallot pie tomorrow; I'll be working extra to get ready for the quarterly report at work, but I am also likely to be snowed in, since the forecast is snow, 1 to 5 inches.

My fridge failed Monday and it took the housing office until Wednesday (2 maintenance requests, 2 follow up phone calls, and 1 email to the property mananger cc'd to the county councilor's aide for housing issues) to get it replace. I had to throw out everything but hard cheese and vinegar-based condiments, so I shopped a little more aggressively than usual this week.

Almond croissant, 2 gruyere-bacon wheels, a dozen eggs, mild bratwurst, ground pork, turnips, potatoes, a head of garlic, a quart of apple cider, granny smith and stayman apples, shallots, yellow-eyed beans, brussel sprout stalks, a cabbage.

My plans this week at to make an apple-shallot tartin, turnip soup, braised cabbage with bratwurst and apples, and white chili with pork and hominy.

I reported through the apartment complex's online service request page that there was water dripping from my bathroom ceiling fan on Sunday 02 Nov 2025, and got no response.

Yesterday (Friday, 07 NOV 2025), I emailed the PM and got the maintenance staff (3 guys names Noel, Vladimir, and Martin (the supervisor) who confirmed that there was leakage and went upstairs to figure out what was causing it.

Apparently my upstairs neighbor's bathtub leaks.

There are plumbers here now, and they're going to have to take my bathroom ceiling apart.

Further documentation as this progress.

Kielbasa, apples (Lucy Glo, Calville Blanc D'hiver, Bramley Seedling), 2 heads of garlic, a tiny cipollini onion (given gratis to get me to try them from the apple farmers), gingerdoodle cookies, dark chocolate walnut cookies, a baguette, also picked up a friend's CSA box as they were out of town: a slicer tomato, a butterkin squash, gold potatoes, a small head of broccoli, broccolini, turnips with their greens, bok choy, red beets (without their greens), 2 yellow onions, and a head of red cabbage about the size of a grapefruit.

I'll make a toasted caprese sandwich, braise the kielbasa with the apples and cabbage, maybe make Korean spicy pork with the bok choy and broccoli, maybe roast the turnips and make soup.

I don't get a CSA box because it is too much vegetable for me to eat in a week. Even if I split a box with other people, that's still a lot of vegetables coming at you ever week.

I went to see a Halloween-themed Looney Tunes shorts program after the market, and then the new Frankenstein (which is very good and also very Romantic in the Romanticism movement sense of the word).

Gingerdoodle cookies, dark chocolate walnut cookies, a baguette, mozzarella, slicing tomatoes, hardy kiwi fruit, pint of pickled red onion, pint of horseradish dill pickles, shisho-orange mint lemonade, lavender-lemon verbena lemonade sour packs, 4 lbs of golden potatoes, 3 heads of garlic, Lucy Glo apples, Spitzenburg apples, shishito peppers, bacon-gruyere wheel, and a lemon tart.

Also, the local No Kings rally was along the street at the market -- there were 3 inflatable shark costumes, 2 unicorns, at least 2 guys in tricorn hats (one was in a complete outfit, probably a RevWar re-enactor). Cars driving by kept honking in support.

I was wearing my magnolia shirt from Morning Witch, my green canvas jacket, flared jeans, and fake snakeskin shoes. I got a number of compliments.

Leek-mushroom turnover, lemon tart, hard kiwifruit, American persimmons, bell peppers, purple UFO peppers, shennadoah pears, honeycrisp apples, pink pearl apples.

I'm going to try making salsa morada with the UFO peppers, and see if applesauce made with the pink pearl apples has a pink tingle to it.

Two brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba) plants, 7 lbs of yellow peaches, donut peaches, mixed plums, magness pears, figs, hardy kiwi fruit, goat mozzarella, a baguette, dark chocolate walnut cookies, anaheim peppers, and roma tomatoes.

I got compliments on my shirt (Velvet Night button-down from MorningWitch) and my packbasket.

8lbs of peaches, black amber plums, pluots, figs, a quart of whole milk, goat mozzarella, baguette, roma tomatoes, bell peppers, peach and plum cake slices, and walnut dark chocolate cookies.

I'm making a toasted caprese sandwich again and will be making peach salsa mid-week.

Peach lemonade, french baguette, olive-thyme sourdough loaf, bacon-gruyere wheel, almond croissant, value tomatoes, prune plums, donut peaches, regular peaches, cardamon pull-apart bun, swiss bar (pastry with cheese), and 1/2 lb mixed mushrooms

Porterhouse steak, yellow chanterelle mushrooms, 4lbs of peaches, plums, shishito peppers, and donut peaches.

A baguette of bread, goat mozzarella, 1/2 lb of cremini mushrooms, snacking peppers, donut peaches, 4lb of yellow peaches, nectarines, apricots, flat-leafed parsley plant, sorrel plant, chocolate chip cookies, walnut dark chocolate cookies.

I harvest several tomatoes from my garden and made a toasted caprese sandwich for dinner.

NY strip steak, sweet Italian sausage, soft goat cheese, goat's milk caramel (cajeta), bell peppers, anaheim peppers, 4lb of yellow peaches, apricots, sesame apricot cupcake, fingerling potatoes, yellow plums, dragon's breath cheese, tavern blue cheese, black beans, whipple beans, jacob's cattle beans, and black rice.

I'm going to sear the strip steak and top it with slices of the blue cheese for dinner.

The peaches need a few days to finish ripening and then I will make them into salsa.

Bacon-cheese wheel, almond croissant, apricots (!!), red plums, strawberries, yellow raspberries, black raspberries, sour cherries (pie!), donut nectarines, strawberry lemonade, a gallon of herbal lemonade, brown sugar kettle corn, caramel kettle corn.

Next week I will buy red sweet cherries (for ketchup) and peaches (for salsa), and actually enter my canning in the county's agricultural fair this year.

Fun fact, red currants used to be illegal to plant in the United States -- they are the second host for white pine blister rust disease, and that is a threat to the lumber industry as white pine is very susceptible to it. This is why purple candy in the USA is grape-flavored, while in Europe purple candy is currant-flavored; we didn't *have* currants (or gooseberries) legally for almost 100 years.

2 quarts of yellow sweet cherries, 1 quart of blue berries, 1 pint of black raspberries, 1 pint of apricots, 1 lb of black beans, 1 lb popcorn, 1 strawberry lemonade, 1 quart of chocolate milk, bacon-gruyere wheel, almond croissant, and a lemon tart.

Brown sugar kettle corn, a quart of strawberries, a pint of blueberries, 2 pints of black raspberries, 3 cups of saskatoons, 2 quarts of sour cherries, a half-pint of black currants, almond croissant, bacon-gruyere wheel, lemon tart, and then I picked up my friend's CSA share as they and their spouse are out of town for the weekend and got: garlic scapes, bunching onions, sugar snap peas, mini romaine (broken romaine leaves in a plastic bag), red leaf lettuce, kale, and red beets.

Empanadas (masaco and nutellla), rosemary plant, yellow sweet cherries, tart cherries, red raspberries, black raspberries, almond croissant, bacon-and-gruyere wheel, sugar peas in pods, carrot-walnut mini-cake, chocolate raspberry mini-cake, walnut-chocolate cookies, and locally grown brown rice.

Three quarts of strawberries, 3 pints of sweet cherries, a pint of sugar peas, locally grown brown rice, locally grown polenta, large soft pretzel, gruyere-bacon pastry wheel, lemon tart, fennel plant, dill plant, zinnia, cilantro, basil (all three plants given away by the local Master Gardeners group).

I guess I'm making strawberry jam this weekend.

Two nasturtium plants, a six-pack of marigolds, a flank steak, a quart of mango gelato, a half-pint of cherimoya gelato, bacon-gruyere wheel, fruit tart, Montaintop Moon cheese, dark walnut cookies, 2 pints of peas in the pods, 2 quarts of strawberries, dandelion greens, swiss chard, lovage, and mizumi greens.

Last night I went with

greenygal, the Vegan Knitter, and A Person To Be Pseudonymed Later (aka Euterpe) to see Madame Satan, Cecil B DeMille's only musical at the AFI.

It was fun, though the male lead character does not deserve his awesome wife -- she's so much more interesting than he is, because he's just keeping a vaudevillian as his mistress, and she's willing to crash at the mistress' apartment, force her husband's friend Jimmy to keep up the charade that the mistress is actually his new wife, and when that doesn't solve the problem of her husband's straying, she crashes the masquerade ball that Jimmy is hosting on a zeppelin in a regal and extremely reveling dress as 'Madam Satan', who speaks with a French accent and captives her husband away from the mistress.

There is an extended dance sequence with 'Electricty' that is definitely influenced by the robot creation scene in Metropolis, and was performed by then-famous dancer Theodore Kosloff and an ensemble dressed as gears and mechanisms.

The film abruptly veers into a disaster film as the zeppelin gets caught in a thunderstorm and has to be evacuated via parachute. The film was made in 1930, which was after the USS Shenandoah disaster, but 7 years before the Hindenburg disaster, so the disaster in the movie is based on the Shenandoah, which crashed in three pieces.

The sound quality of the film and the singing styles of the time also means that I missed most of the words of the songs, but it still made sense without them.

Afterwards, we had dinner at Charm Thai and discussed how you would remake the movie today -- consensus was, we'd absolutely have to change the ending, possibly by having the wife and mistress run off together.

This morning, I went with

ellen_fremedon and the Vegan Knitter to the Brookside Gardens Spring Native Plant sale -- they picked up some plants to replace the dawn redwood sapling they had to take out of their front bed before it grew big enough to damage their home's foundation and to replace a hosta and a boxwood in the back. I picked up a miniature rose, a stonecrop, a gold-edged hen-and-chicks sempervivum, and a pot of lance-leafed loosestrife (which has a lovely bronze color).

We swung by the Ace Hardware to get some leaf mould fertilizer and then by my place to pick up my garden fork, and then went to their place to get the boxwood and hosta out -- which was a lot of work, as the hosta was actually mass of hostas that we had to excavate around to get out. The soil here is mostly clay, so we mixed about a third of the bag of leaf mould in before putting the native plants in the ground.