bunsen_h

I woke up this morning to the smell of tonight's dinner cooking. Chick peas in a crock pot: two great things that go great together, as the ad goes.

I soaked the dried chick peas for about six hours, then drained them and added fresh water. Added chopped-up mushrooms -- I bought them on sale about two weeks ago, intending to cube and freeze them, but never got around to it; I had to cut out some bits, and what was left wasn't at their best, but wotthehell. Some peanuts-only peanut butter, crushed chilis, whole mustard seed, a bit of vegetable oil.  A bit of garlic powder: enough for taste, not enough to trigger indigestion for me.  Simmered overnight.

Today, I'll add some chopped carrots, and possibly some chopped-up spinach that's also seen better days, because why not? More peanut butter, chilis, and ground ginger, plus some salt and possibly a bit of soy sauce, probably a bit more vegetable oil. All to taste, of course.

Chilis, mustard seed, ginger: you may see a pattern. This stew will be warming. The peanut butter and chick peas will mellow it. We've had some cold weather lately, and we've got snow and freezing rain and rain coming.

I plan to bake bread this afternoon. Supper tonight should be very nice.

Yesterday, I bought a glass "chimney" for 99¢ at Value Village.  This will make it much easier for me to move a candle from room to room with me.  Occasionally I've left a burning candle unattended for "just a moment" (and moments sometimes stretch for hours if I get distracted), and I've resolved to not do that any more.  It's an easy mistake to make, and the consequences can be horrible.  :-(

It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I hadn't had crumpets in a long time.  (I'm referring here to edible consumables, not to any kind of colloquialism, about which I will say naught.)  I started looking around the local grocery stores, and had no luck at all.  A woman at the bakery counter at the local Loeb's told me that they usually carried them but that their supplier had had a fire in their local bakery; they were managing to ship other baked goods from their other bakery in Alabama, but that bakery didn't make crumpets.
Has anyone noticed them on sale in Ottawa lately?  It's not a high priority, but now I've got a bit of a hankering.

My usually-reliable cookbook set, the Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, has a recipe for them, but the recipe is obviously not trustworthy.  It says that the batter can either be poured into greased rings on a hot griddle, or rolled out on a floured board and cut into pieces.  The former seems much more plausible, but I'd have to get a set of muffin rings or the equivalent, and all in all it sounds like more effort than I'd intended to invest in this.