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And While We’re at It…Cucumber Gin Rickey Recipe

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A gin rickey is like a gin and tonic, only with club soda: no sugar! No sugar, no sodium…how dietetic can you get?

Unless you squeeze a lot of lime or lemon into a gin rickey, it can be, on the whole, bland. On the other hand, it must be allowed that a large cold glass of plain carbonated water (slightly adulterated with alcohol) is mighty refreshing at the end of a 109-degree day.

To make it even more refreshing — and rather tasty — add a slice of cucumber.

The strategy:

Slice off a piece of Armenian cucumber (the kind that comes sealed in plastic) or peel a length of regular cuke (the kind that comes slathered in wax that you can’t wash off) and cut a peeled slice off that. One or the other — doesn’t matter ; just evade the wax.

Drop the cucumber slice into the bottom of a tall glass. Take a spoon and bash it a bit, within reason.

Add a jigger of gin. Squeeze an eighth or a quarter of a lemon over this (depending on the lemon’s size). Let it sit for a minute or so, maybe, depending on your sense of urgency.

Now add a few ice cubes, as desired. Fill to the top with club soda, preferably cold.

You could, in theory, drop in a sprig of mint.

Absolute, perfect refreshment.

Eggplant Joy!

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This diet food is pretty darned good. Actually, the scheme to lose 20 pounds in 10 weeks is forcing me to go so far as to cook new things, rather than plodding through my usual mealtime sleepwalk.

I found an elegant little eggplant at Sprouts the other day. Determined to eat it before it turned to mildew in the fridge, I broke it out yesterday. Check out the result:

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It turned out amazingly delicious, with a rich, tangy flavor that I didn’t expect. Here’s how to make it, or something like it:

Get your hands on the following ingredients, more or less:

• 1 eggplant
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• a few edible fresh tomatoes (I use Campari tomatoes, the only ones in our markets that have a flavor)
• some fresh whole mushrooms
• bell pepper (the “sweet mini” variety that comes in bags is perfect)
• fresh or dried herbs, or a combination (I had marjoram, parsley, & rosemary in the garden; added some fines herbes)
• small handful of pine nuts, if you have some
• small can low-salt tomato sauce
• feta or Parmesan cheese
• olive oil
• wine (I used red, but think white wine would be good and sherry or Madeira might also be very nice)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the eggplant lengthwise into thick slices. If necessary to fit your baking dish, cut these into smaller pieces.

AuberginesIf you’re not trying to avoid salt, you can sprinkle the slices with salt and set them on an oven rack placed over the sink. Let them sit about an hour and then wipe off the exuded moisture and salt with a paper towel. The slices should be dry before proceeding.

This salting procedure leaches out the bitterness you sometimes find in eggplant, particularly older, tougher eggplants. It’s unnecessary with younger fruits, so if you’re doing a low-salt diet, you should avoid older eggplants and leave out this step. No harm was done when I declined to salt the pieces of my small, tender aubergine.

Next, coarsely chop some onion. I used about half of a large onion — estimate how much you need according to taste and amount of eggplant.

Skim the bottom of a frying pan with a little olive oil and sauté the onion gently, over medium heat, until it’s translucent and just starting to brown. Add the pine nuts, if you’re using them.

Meanwhile, wash the ’shrooms and trim off the bottom of the stem (leave the mushrooms themselves whole); chop the garlic, and cut the fresh tomatoes into about 1-inch chunks. Slice the bell pepper into attractive, bite-size pieces. Chop any fresh herbs you intend to use.

As the onion cooks, add remaining items one at a time. First put in the mushrooms — if they soak up too much of the olive oil, add a little more, but if you wait for a few minutes after starting the onions, they should be OK without added oil. Stir these around and go on about your business for a few more minutes. Then add the garlic and herbs.

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Stir the simmering ingredients around and let cook for another couple of minutes. Shortly, add the pepper slices. Stir; allow to cook until the pepper softens a bit. As this is happening, add the wine.

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Now let this simmer for at least eight or ten minutes. The idea is to get the ’shrooms to soak up wine, which makes them amazingly good to eat.

While the mixture is simmering, spread the eggplant slices on the bottom of an oven-proof baking dish. Ideally, they should be one layer, but you can fish-scale them as necessary. You’ll want the sauce to completely cover the eggplant.

Eventually, stir the can of tomato sauce into the simmered veggie/wine mixture. Spoon the resulting sauce over the eggplant slices and, if desired, sprinkle feta or Parmesan over the top. If you’re really serious about low sodium or you’re a strict vegan, skip the topping! But…I find it impossible to contemplate eggplant, onions, garlic, and tomato without some sort of cheese over it. So, yes: the serpent tempted me and I did eat.

Place this lovely concoction into a 350-degree oven and cook, uncovered, about 40 minutes, give or take.

With a little salad on the side, it makes a yummy dinner that will fill you up.

¡Buen provecho!

🙂

It Seems So Obvious…

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Why didn’t we think of it before?…

• Go to Costco about 6 or 7 p.m., and you avoid the crowds. The place stays open until 8:30, but by 6:00 or so, the mob has gone home to dinner.

• Those clear plastic boxes that hold pre-picked and supposedly washed lettuce? Emptied and washed, they’re perfect to hold your salad makings: a bag of carrots, a couple bunches of green onions, a half-used cucumber, a bunch of radishes, a bell pepper, a small jar of artichoke hearts. No more rummaging through  refrigerator drawers every time you want to make a tossed salad!

• Salad greens that come in those clear plastic boxes usually wilt soon and often end up half-spoiled. One could avoid that and still have convenience by saving the boxes, then buying whole heads of lettuce, washing them, breaking off the leaves, patting them dry, and storing them in the boxes. Put a paper towel in there to help stabilize humidity in the box.

• A digital tool that runs on batteries needs to have fresh batteries. Change the batteries in the bathroom scale, known to run two or three pounds lighter than the balance scale in the doc’s office, and lo! It comes up with a number half-a-pound heavier than it did. Still not accurate, but closer.

• Members of the One Percent are exempt from ordinary laws that apply to the hoi polloi.

Case in point: woman is walking her large dog through the park, off the leash. I have to maneuver Cassie away from Poopsie, who approaches us aggressively and does not come to call. Later, as I come around the last leg of my jog around the park, I see Poopsie running loose in the park, no sign of his human. She’s across the street opening the back door of her vehicle for him. He runs across the road — a feeder street through the neighborhood, and this is now high rush hour — and jumps in. The oncoming car, fortunately, is far enough away to miss hitting him. She climbs into the driver’s seat and, smiling, drives contentedly away in her Mercedes SUV.

Wonder what a permit to let your dog run loose costs?

• If I would not check e-mail at 5:00 a.m., I wouldn’t be sucked into the client’s vortex of confusing changes in proof 3 (!!!) and then maybe I could get out the door before 6:30, when the sun is glaring in everyone’s eyes and the thermometer is already pushing Hotter Than Hell.

• If I would jog first and then walk Cassie, that would circumvent her occasional not-gonna-do-this mood, and then I wouldn’t have to drag her back from the park, put her in the house, and start over again.

• The brand-new, very nice Sprouts is on the canal. I could ride my bike down there, if there’s a place to lock it up at the store. Come to think of it, after the weather cools off, I could walk to that Sprouts! And that would be a long enough hike to make up the day’s required aerobic self-abuse.

• If one would not take on any new clients, one wouldn’t have the issue of having too g.d. much work to do. Betcha one wouldn’t see any more mind-boggling, byzantine labyrinths of corrects on corrects on corrects on corrects, either.

Life in the New (healthful, we hope) Regime

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P1010572Believe it or not, I’ve lost ten pounds since the present healthcare nightmare started (as of May 23) and four pounds since officially beginning The Diet & Exercise Regime. I’ve consumed so many veggies and so many fruits that any day now I’m going to turn into a flowering plant. But what’s really making the difference is the exercise. Jogged 1.4 miles this morning; swam 20 laps of the backyard swimming pool this afternoon; will probably jog another .66 mile this evening if it gets cool enough for Cassie the Corgi to trot that far by around 9 p.m.

She couldn’t take it this morning because it was already bloody hot by 6 a.m., so I had to bring her back and go on my way alone — she’s so furry, the heat really does her in. My “jog” is her “slow lope,” but interestingly, she’s VERY hot to trot…now that she knows I can stumble along behind her, she’s become demanding. Very demanding.

It was a crisp 102 degrees here today. Not bad, for this time of year: June is summertime in the Valley of We-Do-Mean Sun. But the Cassowary is built for a climate zone where 80 degrees is a heat wave. This is, after all, a beast bred to chase sheep in Wales. To keep her safe in the heat, I have to drench her head with cool water before and after taking her out. Dogs are more susceptible to heat stroke than humans because they’re built for short sprints — not, like apes of the homo genus, for long steady runs across the veldt — and in a place like Arizona they succumb quickly to the effects of a 100-degree day.

Presumably the fast weight loss is the combined result of the blood pressure pills, which include a diuretic, and of getting off my butt for longer than it takes to limp from the computer to the refrigerator. No doubt within a few days this will slow down to a saner rate (I’ve lost four pounds just in the past three days). In the meantime, I’ve been having some great kitchen adventures cooking up edible diet-friendly dishes.

Here’s one to try, even if you’re not dieting.

Mango salad

Place some nice, tender salad greens on a plate. Peel a delicious ripe mango. Slice up the meat and arrange the slices appealingly over the greens.

Now add a handful of walnuts or pecans and a handful of lovely fresh blueberries. Chop a little green onion and sprinkle that over the top. Squeeze a little fresh lemon or lime over the top, and dribble some olive oil over that.

You say you’re not on a diet? Well, hell…run amok! Brown those nuts in some butter and sprinkle some Parmesan cheese over the top. But y’know, really: it’s not necessary.

😉

Why I Love to Read the Business Section, and Other Linkish Topics

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Where else could you hope to find this astonishing story that appears today in the Times business section? So…the question is, in the brave new world, who will be the masters and who the slaves: the bionic avatars or the living beings? My money’s on the living beings: if we can create these immortal objects, we can leave aggression out of the design.

It’s been a quiet week, more or less, in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun. Summer is here…which reminds me, I forgot to turn the water on the potted plants in front. It’s already 1:00 p.m. — damn things are probably dead.

Oww ow ow!!!! The flagstones  are so hot they burned my feet! It’s a wonder anything can stay alive out there, even in the shade. What a place! 🙄

It’s still cool enough (sort of) in the mornings and evenings to go out for some exercise. Cassie and I jogged 1.66 miles yesterday, by circumnavigating the park at 5:00 a.m. and jogging around the usual doggy-walk track at night. She was less than thrilled about starting in on that routine this morning, though. Wonder why…?

Someone over in the One Percenters’ part of the neighborhood has put up one of those curbside library boxes! It is so cool! They even set out a garden bench next to it. I dropped off an Alexander McCall Smith novel, recently read, and picked up an old novel by one Andrea Camilleri, purchased sometime in the past for £12.99 from a British bookseller. McCall Smith’s wonderful Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency series delighted me; having read through all those books, I decided to try one from the Corduroy Mansions series. It wasn’t as entertaining as the Africa books, but it was OK.

Ah, but in this day and age we need not trouble ourselves with spending pounds and pence on good reading material. Digital browsing notwithstanding, Frugal Scholar and Miss Em have figured out how to break even, if not make a profit, on the purchase of books.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Accountability contemplates ways to get your reading matter at minimal cost — and along the way offers a surprising tip on how to shave some time and money off Amazon book purchases.

I really enjoyed this particularly bright flash of common sense from Evan at My Journey to Millions.

At Debt Roundup, Grayson tells a hilarious (not to him, I fear) story of yet another moment of customer disservice. A potentially expensive one, we might add.

TFB’s rumination, at The Financial Blogger, about what he would do with his time if he could work up the nerve to quit his job leads to a very interesting projected schedule. Anyone who wants to get serious about building a blogging empire should read this.

Money Beagle speculates that we are not in a stock market bubble, and explains why.

Revanche over at A Gai Shan Life has rejuggled her retirement savings. She’s decided she really likes Vanguard.

Donna Freedman has a nice post on managing satisfaction in life.

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail is enjoying (heh!) another trip through the bureaucratic maze that is America’s medical system.

Speaking of the which, did you see eye-popping story, also in today’s Times, about what — really! — drives up the cost of medical care in this country? Holee mackerel!

Eemusings and New Hubby visit Angkor Wat, where they have an encounter with one of the locals. Don’t miss the video! The images of the temples are pretty amazing, too.

Nicole and Maggie stir up some conversation over at Grumpy Rumblings of the (Formerly) Untenured with a rumination on whether some people relish misery and drama.

Crystal has added a new province to the Blogging Empire: a newsletter. Go here to sign up — Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has always been full of good ideas, and this newsletter promises to carry on the tradition.

Speaking of books and blogs, I should be finishing up my proposed e-book. And so, to work!

 

Yarnell Dreamin’

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So on Wednesday it was up to Yarnell with SDXB, there to visit La Maya, who is combining the summer, a fall semester of online courses, and a spring sabbatical to engineer a six-month retreat from the craziness that is her life down here in the Valley. She’s using the time to finish the anthology that she’s compiling with a co-editor (and that I’m copyediting) and to complete the monograph she’s begun. I expect she’ll spin off at least a couple of articles, too.

It’s so lovely up there, cool and breezy and quiet. Very quiet. Very soothing.

About a third of the town is for sale, thanks to the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression. Walking around, we came upon the CUTEST little mini-house. They want $140,000 for it. Somebody bought one of the old miner’s shacks, basically demolished it to a wall, and then rebuilt completely. The result is…hard to describe.

The place is basically one room, but not. It’s a large one-story space where a generously sized bedroom has been partitioned off. There’s a very handsome, well appointed kitchen and a huge living space. And a service porch with a washer-dryer hookup and, I think, room enough for a freezer. An upright freezer would certainly fit in there, and you probably could get a small chest freezer into the space.

At first, peering in the windows, I thought DOWNSIZE!!!! Here’s your chance to downsize with a vengeance.

On second glance, though, it didn’t look to me as though the place has enough space for even one decent clothes closet. That would make it useful, alas, only for weekend retreats. It doesn’t look like you could reasonably expect to live there, no matter how much junk you divested yourself of.

While I could fit all my clothes into one closet, here in the Valley one of my house’s bedroom closets is completely given over to office supplies and computer gear. And it’s full. I need that stuff to do business, so, alas, there’s no practical way I could actually live up there. At least, not in that place.

Another holds linens plus the space heaters in winter and the fans in summer. No place in that pretty little house to fit your sheets and towels, either, as far as I could see.

But oh, it’s totally cute. It has its own well, which frees one from a very large expense (the local water company knows it has the residents by the short hairs). The natural landscaping with big local trees and a pile of granite boulders in back is just gorgeous.

Not a single helicopter buzzed us all day long. One noisy fighter jet passed by to the west, a single outlier from Luke Air Force Base. Otherwise, the sky was the way a sky is supposed to be: quiet, except for the occasional wind blowing through the trees. And the occasional bird tweeting, cooing, or cawing.

What would it be like to live there?

Quiet, I imagine.

And limited: when there are only so many people in a town, there are only so many personalities to get to know. And only so many activities, other than arguing over the water company, ever go on. And there’s no place to shop. by that, we mean really no place to shop. The locals have to drive all the way in to Prescott, Wickenburg, or Phoenix to visit a Costco or a supermarket. One gas station (imagine what gas costs in that place!).

It’s a great place to visit, but…yeah.

The wish i could afford a vacation home thought wafted briefly through my mind, followed by the ARE YOU CRAZY? thought. Even if I could afford it, do I or do I not have enough work taking care of the place I’m living in, which is itself in a place that people pay to come and visit.

Speaking of taking care of the place, it’s past time to finish the laundry and clean up this shack. Bye!