Last night I made that black bean soup from Smitten Kitchen. I ought to have started it in the morning before going off to work in the lab, but my previous night’s self prevented me from doing that.
I had mixed up a batch of cookie dough, and thought that I might just do the thing that I never have the patience to do –chill the dough at least for a few hours (by the way, I am never following the cookie recipe on the back of the Wegman’s chocolate chip package again; it’s a little weird). I timed it so that I finished making the dough just before I had arranged to meet up with a friend for drinks. This way I couldn’t renege on my promise and bake them right away. Of course by the time I came home I didn’t particularly feel like staying up any longer and baking several batches of cookies on my one baking sheet. There was also a significant danger that the act of removing the dough from the refrigerator would lead to an overly large midnight snack of cookie dough (and associated stomach-achy repercussions). All of this is to say that I ended up baking cookies before heading to work Friday morning instead of starting the black bean soup in the crock pot.
This was a mistake.
It wasn’t clear exactly how long the soup would take to cook because it uses dried black beans, and I also suspect that different brands of crock pot have varying temperatures. At about 5 o’clock I started the soup, thinking that it would probably be done by 8, in time for a late dinner. It was not to be. At 9 I gave up and ate cheese and crackers for dinner, all the while smelling the as yet inedible deliciousness slowly cooking away in the kitchen. It was finally finished around 11, but it did make a really good lunch today.
At some point (sooner rather than later, please!) I want to try The Bandwagon Brew Pub, which I just noticed the other day when walking home from the bus. The idea of a beer and “Hand cut Fries with Catsup, Malt Vinegar Aioli & Curry Mayonnaise” is very appealing to me (although I’m not sure how I feel about the studied usage of the more archaic “catsup”).
I also took a quick trip to the Museum of the Earth this afternoon and saw the best crinoids I’ve ever seen (on the bottom). They are much easier to identify in this form than in messy looking outcrops. The museum also has a special exhibit on amber (through February 21st) that had some neat examples on loan. I also learned how to tell whether something called amber really is amber: it won’t float in regular water but will float in salt water (2.5 Tbsp per 1 cup water), and if touched with a heated needle it will smell like tree resin, not like burning plastic (although it might also crack, so be careful). There were also examples of pressed amber (reconstituted scraps pressed into a new form) which is used in a lot of amber jewelry. This impelled me to check my amber as soon as I got home. Of course it is all pressed, so I felt a little sad about that. I couldn’t resist checking my thrift store amber look-alike necklace in the faint hope that somehow they’d seriously messed up and sold amber as plastic. No such luck. Those elderly ladies doing the pricing are as sharp as tacks.
Peregrinations 