Fun and Useful Things

...That I did this weekend.

This has been the most productive weekend I've had in quite some time. Only worked 8 hours on Friday, which left me a lot more time than I'm used to having for doing things around the house. And there's a lot of things that I need and like to do, that I rarely have time for.

Shortly after moving in, deadrose and I put in some garden space, and I planted a couple of nice globe zucchini plants. Most of the summer they haven't been producing much, all the little zukes just rotted by the time they got to the size of golfballs. But one of them grew really nicely. Huge. I don't really like zucchini as is, it's icky. But I love zucchini bread. So I shredded up the zuke, after taking a couple pictures, and had my mom email me her recipe (and old family recipe). I figured it'd be good for a couple medium-sized loaves, maybe three or four. I ended up making six.

Gonna take one to work, and give several others away. Part of the fun of making stuff like this is sharing it. And I've got another zucchini growing that looks like it'll be close to the same size. Lots more zucchini bread to share! (Set some aside specifically for mecracker and drkabyss11, and ulrich and treebyleaf. It freezes well, but you should get it soon, it's yummy.)

Finally got off my butt and made another of my summer favorites as well. Jamica (pronounce ha-mike-ah), a traditional hispanic summer drink made by steeping dried hibiscus (jamica) flowers. I do it a bit differently. I get a huge pile of them, and steep them in a 4 quart pot like tea. That makes an almost unbearably strong concentrate, that I store in the fridge, and dilute down (usually about 5 or 6 to 1) so it'll last me a good long time. Made this batch a bit stronger than usual, so I stuck half of it in the freezer, since this stuff is going to last me longer than usual.

Just for something to do, I dug out the ice-cream maker, and made myself a batch of jamica sorbet. It turned out very nice, quite a bit better than I expected. Just the right balance of sweet, tart, and astringent; with a good, strong flavour. Ended up with about a quart of it, so anyone who comes over soon enough will have to try it. (You may go home with some zucchini bread as well.) And it was just a smple sorbet recipe, too, 1 cup sugar, 2 cups water, 1.5 cups of the strong jamica tea. Boil the sugar and water, cool a little and mix in the jamica, freeze. Nothing else. Got enough of the concentrate left to make a whole lot more.

( Pictures of my zucchini )

In more useful but less pleasant news, I also managed to fix my shower. It's been leaking badly since I moved in, due to a really crappy caulking job, or rather, several really crappy caulking jobs on top of each other. So I cleaned it all out and recaulked. And tomorrow I can take a shower without worrying about flooding the bathroom. Unfotunately, it appears that there's a leaky main water pipe under my yard somewhere, so I have to find out where that is an call the landlord about it. Yay. :( While I like the house, and it's a decent place to live overall, there are lots of little annoying things, broken things, that I have to deal with fixing or getting fixed. The landlord supposedly had a lot of work done on the place, but the people who lived here previously did a lot of damage to the place, and the guys who worked on it aren't exactly what I'd call completely competant. One of the broken kitchen drawed was "fixed" with box tape; and there are a lot of little leaks.

My summer squash is finally starting to produce decent-sized fruits; so I'm off to have battered and fried Yellow Crookneck Squash for dinner.