Limonene

I’m putting this on my list to try. I love a good crumb cake!

I donated directly because I wasn’t 100% sure the money would arrive in time if I went through the match program (when I applied for the matching funds later, it seemed to say that they wouldn’t be distributed until the end of December).

MERRY CHRISTMAS, TED COOPER is my favorite movie so far this season—it’s so good!

That is a real shame. I adore CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT and I think that a remake for the influencer era could have been really interesting if done well.

Alas, I’m caught between the moon and New York City (and a bunch of cloud cover).

Oh, no.

Congratulations! This is excellent news!

It’s time for the annual Bull City Foodraiser, to provide a bag of groceries to each of over 5000 schoolchildren to help keep them fed over winter break. There are really generous per-donor matches pledged this year, so a $5 donation made by 11/14 at 11:59 pm PST will turn into over $100 of food!

Those bunnies are delightful!

The Imperial is really uncomfortable, even by Broadway theater standards. I hope you enjoy the show!

A closeup of a cluster of small, cream-colored flowers and little bean pods on a viney plant with leaves clustered in groups of 3.

A cluster of green butterbean pods that are kind of lumpy with beans. There is a messy fall garden with dried leaves and tomato cages in the background.

A black tray filled with cream and brown/purple speckled Lima beans. Most are light with dark speckles but some are dark with light speckles.

I’m going to be so sad to pull my butterbeans on Monday. A 6-foot row yielded about a pound of dried beans over the season, and they are still flowering like gangbusters. I just don’t think I can keep them going through a multi-night freeze. 🌱

Happy birthday!

What a dapper little gentleman!

I really need to work on my nato alphabet because when I try to use it properly, I get tripped up spelling my own last name (I think my dad deliberately didn’t teach me that way when I was a kid; in fairness, he did hate every single second he was in the Army).

I hope you feel better soon.

Have a great show!

At least with the other fads throughout history, you got an actual rock, or a cute stuffed animal, or a pretty flower, and not just a certificate of authenticity for a JPEG.

A cardboard tray full of unwashed, stubby, orange carrots with luxuriant greenery. There’s also a random beet and a whole bunch of oak and sassafras leaves mixed in.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have lost my temper and ripped out all the carrots in one of the garden beds, but I was working by flashlight ahead of a freeze and had run out of tarps.

It is so good and takes so little effort! My other favorite sauce of hers involves peeling fresh tomatoes with a vegetable peeler, dicing them in 1/4” pieces and adding them to onions that have been diced and cooked down, so it’s a lot more involved and seasonal.

I don’t remember having tried a filled coffee cake before. This sounds really good!

A well-made Manhattan is one of life’s true pleasures.

I’ve had a thing about cooking in plastic engrained since childhood so I take everything out of the bag and cook directly in the slow cooker (or in a baking dish in the oven if it’s a frozen lasagna or something). It seems to work fine, except the oven ones take longer than the directions say.

It may be a sign of unresolved trauma from past elections, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop (which it could, locally because there are some really awful school board candidates this year).

I’m kind of in disbelief? Her campaign was so lackluster and I don’t think NJ voters have voted for a Democratic governor for 3 terms in a row in my lifetime.

That is fair. But, we have barometers and meteorologists now, so being able to predict the weather with our central nervous systems is no longer any kind of advantage!

It is the worst superpower.

I am so grateful to Past Me for putting those frozen chicken thighs in a secondary container when I put them in the fridge to thaw. That would have been a lengthy and unpleasant cleanup.

This is my first time trying them as a winter squash, so I don’t have any tried-and-true suggestions of it is more mature. My 2 big squash only got that way by stealth. They were hiding in a rhododendron bush on the other side of the fence from my vegetable garden!

If it’s more zucchini-like, I am a huge fan of the Smitten Kitchen recipes for zucchini butter spaghetti and zucchini quesadillas, and I have successfully frozen both at the cooked-down-but-pre-pasta-or-cheese stage. It’s more flavorful and less watery than regular zucchini.

Two approximately yardlong greenish-beige squash with very long necks, on either side of a measuring tape, with small bunches of beets and carrots beside them.

That’s impressive! My biggest were only 3 feet long. By the time of year, I am guessing that is a fully mature squash rather than a younger one that is more like a zucchini?