Les Bonnes Choses

I've not updated in over a week, though I am sure you will accept my excuse that I was finalizing my dissertation so that I could hand it in yesterday. The deadline for handing it in was today, at 3pm, by which time I had noticed that I had not changed the titles on some of my tables and figures as I had planned, nor had I found and fixed the two cross-reference text errors that occurred because I was trying to be all fancy in MSWord. Oh well. That will be the low-hanging fruit for Marc, Paul and Stefan, my departmental examining committee.

Speaking of low-hanging fruit, I tried and failed, and have begun again to make some crabapple jelly. My parents have a crabapple tree in the backyard that is currently weeping small fruit all over the lawn. Mom sent a bunch over to me the other day, and I tried to adjust the recipe to account for the fact that I had no pot large enough to contain 2 kilos of crabapples. Something didn't scale well, however, as the juice apparently didn't have enough pectin to form a jelly, so this morning I made scorched crabapple candy as I boiled the syrup of juice and sugar in vain. This evening when we picked up Jude from his Nana's house, I climbed a step ladder and picked some more crabapples, scaring the crap out of Rebecca in the process (though my insurance is paid up, so I don't know what her problem is). My innovation to the recipe will be to infuse some mulling spices before I add the sugar. That should be damn tasty.

Also from my kitchen lab (I have been on a cooking spree this week), I tried to make a sweet balsamic vinaigrette the other day. Balsamic vinegar can be made into a sweet syrup by reducing it. It is also sometimes used to marinate strawberries. So I thought that reduced balsamic vinegar mixed with olive oil and pepper might make a good vinaigrette for a green salad with strawberries and walnuts (Rebecca also added some goat cheese to hers, which made it look even more fancy). I think it needs a bit of work as a vinaigrette, but it was pretty tasty, and I couldn't stop dipping my bread in the stuff.