Category: Life

Events from J’s and N’s lives.

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Thanksgiving menu

J and I aren’t going to visit my parents like we’d normally do ’cause of the ‘rona 🙁 Organizing the Thanksgiving meal will be a new activity and, with no established traditions for the two of us, we designed a menu tonight!

This is the menu for two, but we still somehow came up with ten dishes. Not sure we’re going to be able to do all this cooking in a single day…

I will link more recipes as I write them up. Hope y’all’s Thanksgiving plans are coming along, too!

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Some of the more interesting furniture I brought to NYC

J and I moved to New York earlier this year (not a great time, I know). I was here alone for a few months, so I had the opportunity to expand my home furnishings collection! I think J and I might have different aesthetic tastes 🙂

This is a herringbone-woven rag rug I found in Austin during one of my neighborhood’s bulk trash pickup days. You can find all kinds of neat things! This rug is really thick and cushy.
This other rag rug was woven by my dad’s maternal grandmother! It was used as a car repair mat (e.g. for laying on) by my dad’s dad for a while and unfortunately had car battery acid leak on some spots. I washed it (it looks soooo much better now) and am in the process of repairing the spots that were partially dissolved by the acid. I’d love to have my dad’s grandmother’s loom, but it disappeared in the multi-generational inheritance process 🙁
Free (only in terms of money, definitely not in labor!) bookshelf I got from my mom’s ex-coworker. This is a barrister’s bookcase made, as far as I can tell, in the early 1900s. The co-worker got it from her grandfather, if I recall correctly.

This bookcase (13″ Gunn sectional bookcase) was made by Gunn Furniture Co. in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The manufacturing information includes two patent dates, Dec 5, 1899 and Jan 1, 1901.

Company stamp

This is the 1901 patent, for “knockdown” furniture. I couldn’t find the 1899 patent (My mom later identified it as this patent. When issued, it was not shown as assigned to any company and the Gunn company may have licensed rights or bought the patent later). It would seem that this bookcase was made between 1901 and 1905, when the furniture company was granted an updated bookcase patent.

The top, base, and side panels are oak – according to other sites, quarter-sawn tiger oak, which was particularly popular in the Arts and Crafts movement (1880-1920, so this bookcase fits right in).

Shelves are a little bunged up.
The plywood backing was a big pain. The layers were warped and de-laminating, so my dad and I glued them back together and parked an RV on top of them while they dried.

The bookcase was in quite bad shape when I got it. Besides re-gluing the plywood and cleaning off lots of spider webs, my dad doweled and glued a split side panel. I disguised some dings in the finish by staining the wood, and tried to fill in chipped areas in the varnish by redissolving it with a solvent and painting it back on, but that didn’t work so well.

Doors installed. The top shelf holds my non-hanging clothes. One of the legs came off in shipping to New York, so I glued the pieces back on and “clamped” it with lots of rubber bands 🙂
My favorite bunk bed from college 🙂 Also oak. I sleep on the top.
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Good, quick bread

I made bread this week from a recipe recommended by (not-college) friend S, whom we met on a Japanese hike in the Bay Area! I share a lot of interests with non-college friend S, like homemade and fermented food, gardening, and sustainability!

This bread has a good neutral flavor – it’s not the most amazingly yeasty, savory bread ever, but it’s good for all your normal bread needs.

Bread

  • 3 cups (390 g) flour
  • 2 tsp (7 g, 1 packet) yeast
  • 1 1/2 tsp (9 g) salt
  • 1 1/2 cups (338 g) water
  1. Mix dry ingredients. Add water. The dough will be quite wet. Cover and let rise in a warm place for an hour.
  2. On a lightly floured work surface, gently stretch and fold the dough several times until firmed up into a loaf, being careful not to deflate completely. Cover and let proof for 15 min.
  3. Bake for 45 min at 450°F.
You can cut the top with a razor if you want.
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Bay Area adventures with my dad!

My dad visited J and me this past fall in California. Unfortunately, he bowed out of staying with us, and didn’t get to experience that studio life!! But we did a number of other fun activities.

Fixing the sofa with dental floss was just one part of getting ready for the visit.
Indian pizza with my dad and friend A.
Peach Dutch baby (fondly called “the big pancake” in my family) for breakfast, recipe courtesy of my mom. We were too ambitious with the peaches – these are supposed to puff a lot more than this usually… I’ll post the recipe on here sometime and y’all can try it out.
Hangar One, completed in 1933, at the Moffett Field Historical Society Museum. Lots of airplanes, old military uniforms, scale models of stuff, etc. There were a lot of interesting older buildings at the airfield. With more time, it would’ve been fun to walk around. Mysteriously, Carnegie Mellon also has an outpost here.
The underside of the Golden Gate bridge!! As seen from Fort Point.
Lighthouse!
Fancy dim sum restaurant! This is Koi Palace in Daly City. J heard about it from… somewhere. It’s supposed to be really good. We got there pretty early in the morning and briefly had to wait in line.
Some hiking~
We got rid of some bad lamps at Goodwill and picked up a new-to-us one! It’s made by Stiffel, my dad’s favorite lamp company. Apparently they’re normally quite expensive ($300) – we got this one for $25!
We also saw this cute replacement shade 🙂
Ate at Original Joe’s, a kinda fancy Italian place in SF.

We went to Santa Cruz and saw some old mission buildings. The actual mission was partially destroyed in a mid-1800s earthquake and replaced by another church. A replica was built in 1931. The only original building was used as housing for Native Americans.

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American, Korean, Chinese…

As so often happens, J and I had nothing in the fridge to eat. No greens, no leftovers, no beans soaked and ready for boiling. Fortunately, we were able to scrape together some lingering and more robust ingredients to cook.

Korean glazed potato side dish from Maangchi.
Korean-style mapo tofu, with some substitutions made (as always)…
The final desperate meal. I do believe the avocado half was our last fresh veggie.

Aaaaand we got our produce delivery today, so we’re back to having fruit and leafy greens!

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Decluttering art supplies!

Here are some old projects I found. I think I made them in middle school – I was really into beading and jewelry then.

Collection of pendants made out of polymer clay!
This is a waterfall jungle scene, complete with vines and reptiles. You’re supposed to hang dangly things from the bottom holes.
Some abstract thing I actually turned into a necklace. It looks kinda like corn…
My mom’s grade-school watercolor kit (we did not get rid of it), and her scientific drawing dip pen! Vintage~

Both of my siblings are strangely attached to crayons. Although they allowed many of our crayons to be given away, the compromise was that we had to keep the 96-color set. As sibling C said, “Who knows when the world will end and we realize we need crayons”.

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Estate sale find: safety razors!

Sibling C and I went to a cool estate sale in Austin a few weeks ago! It was particularly well-organized, and much of the normal junk that clutters estate sales (old food, low-quality mismatched silverware, low-quality pans, etc) had either been hidden or sold.

I was excited to find a small collection of old shaving accoutrements. I have a straight razor (that I need to get sharpened), but I’ve also been interested in trying out safety razors, with the particular goal of being able to recommend them to friends in good faith.

I bought 2 of the razors from the sale for $3.75 each, which seemed like a good price 👍

On the left is a Gillette “Tech” made in the ’40s. It is stainless steel and essentially the same design as modern razors. On the right is a Gillette “Old Type” made in 1914 (105 years old!!). It is silver-plated brass.
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Using up: baguette

I got a free baguette from somewhere a few months ago. It’s been sitting in my freezer since then, desiccating, apparently. I got it out to make banh mi yesterday and discovered that it was rock hard. I would’ve given up on the whole idea except that I’d already bought all the other ingredients.

To attempt to rehydrate the bread, I… steamed it. It mostly worked. Soggy on the outside and still pretty hard on the inside = delicious, right? Fortunately, panfrying got rid of the sogginess.

Bread down, onto the hacked-together filling! The main components of banh mi are some protein (I used fried tofu and scrambled egg), cilantro, mayo, fish sauce, and marinated veggies. I had trouble with the fish sauce (don’t have it) and the marinated vegetables (don’t have vinegar), so I made some wild substitutions like usual.

Julienned carrots and radish are supposed to be marinated in a combination of rice vinegar, sugar, and salt. I didn’t want to buy a whole container of vinegar (and it’s not available in bulk) just as I’m about to move out, so my plan was to use lemon or lime juice in place of vinegar. Lime would be especially fitting – it’s commonly used as a topping. But… the grocery store didn’t have either 🙁 The closest alternative I could find was grapefruit. I still don’t know if that was a good choice.

I added bonito flakes to the marinade to substitute for fish sauce.

The final banh mi-like sandwich. (This nice plate was a bulk-trash-pickup-day find 🙂

The sandwich was actually pretty good, considering. The vegetables only have the faintest hint of grapefruit-bitterness flavor… 😀

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Another using-up recipe: cream biscuits

A while ago, I need to use up a pound or so of sour cream (left over from some event) and some over-cooked sweet potato. I steamed it into sweet potato mush 🙁 I had the bright idea of making pancakes (really good, super tender and fluffy) and biscuits (not so great, but edible).

At least they have a good color. Any suggestions on how to use up a ton of biscuits?

The original biscuit recipe, which is much better than my modification, is from Joy of Cooking:

Cream biscuits

20 2-inch biscuits

  • 2 cups flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt (might need more salt)
  • 1 1/4 cups heavy cream
  1. Mix dry ingredients. Add the cream all at once. Mix until the dry ingredients are moistened.
  2. Gather the dough into a ball and knead it gently 5-10 times, adhering any loose pieces in the process, until the work area is clean.
  3. Roll or pat the dough out to 1/2-inch thick. Cut into desired size (2-inch squares is standard). Reroll and cut any scraps.
  4. Bake in center rack at 450°F for 10-12 minutes until biscuits are golden on top. Set biscuits close together on baking sheet for joined biscuits with soft sides.
  5. (To cook on a griddle, roll dough out to 1/4-3/8-inch thick. Cook in griddle until brown on one side, 3-4 minutes, then turn and cook until brown on the other side.)