when you least expect it

A post about food.

Since discovering Extra Extra Coarse Bulgur a few years ago, it's been a staple in my pantry. I stopped cooking with rice; I find the bulgur has more flavor and texture, and holds up better to the freezing and reheating that are standard procedure here.

The tricky part: this particular bulgur - Duru Extra Extra Coarse - has only been available to me from the shop where I buy Turkish coffee, and I rarely have access to that shop because it is 45 minutes away. So when I do get there, I stock up on both coffee and bulgur.

Well, the last two times I borrowed a car and made the trek, there was no stocking up. The first time there was neither Extra Extra Coarse Bulgur nor Mehmet Effendi coffee on the shelves, and in fact the entire shop looked alarmingly thin in stock. The second time, months later, the shop was "Closed for Renovations." Uh-oh. I began rationing my last bag of bulgur. That's it, in the picture above.

Of course there was still plenty of neglected rice maturing in my cupboard, and a couple of months ago, by a happy chance, I saw a one-minute video about adding more food value to a bowl of white rice. The method also adds more texture and flavor, making this rice mixture a good substitute for the bulgur which had earlier become my substitute for rice. And because the person in the video was using a rice cooker, I tried using the Rice setting on my Gourmia pressure cooker. It worked beautifully. I think a regular pot would work just as well, though the timing might require testing.

Here is the mixture:

1 cup rice, 1/2 cup quinoa, 1/2 cup lentils, 3 cups water.

I've been using red lentils, and all sorts of combinations from half-empty bags of jasmine rice and arborio rice and plain old white rice. The result has more flavor and texture than plain rice, and if freezes and reheats well. Bonus: I finally have a genuinely interesting way to use that bag of quinoa that's been on the shelf for, well, quite a while.

Also it looks rather festive, especially made with tri-color quinoa:

Extra Extra Coarse bulgur would still be my first choice but until

Oh my gosh. Weirdly coincidental newsflash: my Occasional Helper just emailed a news clipping. No details, unfortunately, but the shop where I bought bulgur and coffee from Turkey now has a "for rent" sign on the building. Big sigh. It was a family-owned  business for 20 years. I can only hope the owners and employees are all landing on their respective feet.

I may be making and eating this rice mixture for a while.

Glad I found it.

Let me know if you try it.

~~~~~

update

Creeping toward a more functional (digital) state, here. It's been one step forward, two steps back, but today I received one more piece of phone-ordered paraphernalia (a replacement wifi dongle) and now - dare I say it? - it may just be a matter of getting everything set up again on my old laptop. I can only do an hour or so at a time, and there's a lot of seasonal tasking requiring my time these days, but Winter is coming and everyone needs an indoor hobby, right?

One piece of Plain Good News: that automatic back-up system I've been paying for the past few years has earned it's keep. It took a week of non-stop uploading to transfer the saved files back to the laptop and external hard drive, but now I think I've got them all and it's a matter of reinstalling apps and software, finding the restored files, and putting them "away" again. Here's the scale of this housework:

Even though this is a pretty dull blog post, I want to try to publish it because it will mean I can access and post from the old laptop again. Fingers crossed. Here goes.

~~~~~

morning chores for lily and violet

Note: I am still working on a borrowed laptop and cannot upload images or access the thousands of images stored on my broken laptop. But I found some draft posts stored in blogger, and a few have images already in place, so I'm posting this one composed in December 2013. Greetings from Memory Lane.

~~~~~

 

We all have our little tasks to do in the morning.

Today it was raining lightly, so breakfast was served in the little goat barn for the younger does.

"Please don't make us eat in the rain. Rain makes us sad."

Lily of the Valley assesses the overall quality of the hay by doing the crucial face-test, while Violet takes the single-stem approach for a finely-tuned analysis:

I guess it passed the test!

There's something about listening to animals eat.  It's just pleasant, I don't know why.

And if one is used to the steady and rhythmic

munch.

munch.

munch.

of horses, the sound of goats, with their equally steady but more rapid

munch,munch,munch,munch,munch

is very smile-producing.

Really, goats in general are very smile-producing, as many of your comments have indicated.

I am so happy you are enjoying the goats  :)

But hark!  Violet suddenly stops munching, and is all alertness.

It is the morning school bus, which picks up a gaggle of young children at the corner, about 400 feet downslope from the goat barn.

One of Violet's tasks is to supervise the loading and departure of the bus every day.

(Except weekends, of course.  Everyone deserves time off.)

Here they come.

There they go.

My work here is done.

Got any peanuts in that pocket?

~~~~~

many words few snaps

 

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'                                              

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Writing a blog post after a gap is tricky, because I've got to start somewhere. Every couple of days in July and August (until my laptop died and doing anything online became a faint memory) I started to compose a post, then thought I'd "better wait" until something: an interesting discovery, an item checked off the task list, a happy event. If not a Beginning, I wanted at least a Middle and an Ending. And I was determined not to write about the relentlessly unpleasant weather, because it was already getting far too much airplay in my head every single day.

Yet here I finally am, on a borrowed laptop, writing about weather, because...it's raining today, and it rained yesterday, real rain, hours of rain, for the first time in many weeks. Huzzah!

I am choosing to look at this rainy weekend as an Ending to a very long, too-hot, too-dry, too-humid Middle. So I am writing. Trying to write. Is anyone reading? If so, please wave in the comments. It's been a lonely Middle.

In retrospect, there was a lot of repair work undertaken in July and August, much of it physical, some of it planned. Time spent with the eye surgeon, the dentist, the veterinarian. There were basically two kinds of challenges: expected and unexpected. Here's one example:

Expected challenge: cataract surgery in July. I did as much prep as I could, because I knew there would be several weeks of post-surgical limitations such as never leaning down and never lifting anything over 15 pounds.

Unexpected challenge: not having my Occasional Helper here at all during the cataract recovery period to do any of the necessary leaning and lifting. (Actually, he's been unavailable through much of the Spring and Summer, for various unforeseen reasons.) In desperation - and having a strong inclination to keep my goats alive - I called friends who sent their own Helper over one afternoon to shift feed sacks for me. Bonus: now I've met someone else I can hire - when available between his other jobs - as a backup to the Occasional Helper. So there's a Happy Ending of sorts.

Violet waiting for someone - anyone - to move feed sacks. 

A few days before the eye surgery my neighbor AM came with his tractor for the next step in a project that's been in the works for over a year: a new Very Raised Bed built along the landing at the top of the driveway. Starting way back with the barn salvage in April 2024, a lot of work had gone into the new bed, constructing the lower layers of timber, brush, and shavings. But the top layer was to be the decomposing hay and manure that I've been curating for several years under one of the goats' roundtops. The decision to rebuild the barn meant that this roundtop could be dismantled, and AM and his tractor could scrape up load after load of that enriched material and carry it over to the landing. That was a mucky, sweaty, dirty job, but the day before my surgery I was out watering and planting that new raised bed. Late for planting? Yep. Planted anyway. Winter squash and sunflowers. And since planting=leaning, it had to be finished before the surgery. This has been a dreadful year for gardening, and if there was even a chance of seeing something green and growing, I was not going to let it pass for lack of effort. This was the kind of Ending that is also a Beginning.

squash blossom just before the rain yesterday

How is everything in your neck of the woods?

I hope your July and August have been lovely.

~~~~~

dispatch from the trenches

 

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