Gotta quit working for awhile! Loafing time…
Just finished indexing another chapter of the textual study of the Semiramis narrative, followed from the first century down through the ages. 🙂 I suppose that’s progress. It’s going very slowly.
But at least it’s going. Whenever I get off my duff this afternoon, I’ve gotta move on to the next project: organizing the images and creating a cover for another client’s magnum opus.
Bidness networking meeting this a.m. — 7:15 a.m., a half an hour from the Funny Farm. The snowbirds have gone home now that the weather’s heating up, so the traffic’s not too bad.
Almost out of gas by the time I got back into town, so diddled away some more time traipsing to Costco for a fill-up. Then over to the Favorite Overpriced Gourmet Store to pick up a few edibles, now that I’m finally beginning to feel like eating normal food again. Would like to feed the ailing belly some probiotic microbes and am told you can get many, many more of those from yogurt and from raw sauerkraut, the latter (notably) in a brand called Bubbie’s, than you can from those pricey OTC pills.
Happen to have the Bubbie’s on hand but wanted something good to eat with it: sweet Italian sausage.
Also craved to make some risotto, so wanted to buy some arborio rice and some chicken broth.
None of the broths that come in those cardboard boxes taste like anything other than cardboard to me, so hoped to pick up a can of Campbell’s Soup broth.
Uhm… Not so much. Checking the sodium content…Campbell’s doesn’t even dare tell you what percentage of sodium RDA their elixir contains. No. It’s expressed as “less than 2400 milligrams.”
LOL!!! Would that be “2399 mg”? Holy mackerel.
Another brand listed its content as 300 mg.
Granted, Campbell’s is a concentrate; you dilute it by adding as much water as product. But still: that’s “less than” 1200 mg per serving.
Yech!
So picked up a box of allegedly Italian-made alleged organic chicken broth.
Too lazy today to make risotto: tomorrow, maybe. Meanwhile, grilled a half a sausage (they’re huge) and served it up with some of that lovely sauerkraut and a handful of salad greens. Acceptable enough.
First hot day of the year: 104 degrees. Needed to get a basil plant I’d bought out of its plastic container and into some serious dirt, preferably in a new Talevera pot I snared the other day. And transplant a parched, overgrown spider plant into the other pot snared on the same day. And soften up the soil around the olive tree so as to hammer in a new stake and rope the tree’s trunk into an upright position. And rescue a bunch of other plants that were beginning to fry in the heat.
Jumped in the pool to cool off. Barely got my hair wet before I heard the damn garbage truck roaring up the alley.
Leap out, grab a towel, race back in the house, dripping all over the brand, spanking clean kitchen floor. Not pleased.
After the gardening frenzy, popped a can of exotic red corn (it comes out white, like any other popcorn), poured a bourbon and water, updated the new SBA website, thought about working, didn’t…
Finally got around to keyboarding about 60 index entries on the subject of Simiramis.
Now only two other projects remain to work on today. Maybe.
Oh. My. God. Have I held forth on the manifold ways various operators take advantage of the ever-craving, ever-hopeful, endlessly yearning wannabe writers of the world? Yes. I believe I have.
There’s no end to this stuff. Nor is there any honor among thieves. Check out the local university’s contribution, brought to you by a graduate program guaranteed to render you unemployable. Presto-digito! It’s an MFA Lite in genre writing!
And how much will this endeavor set you back? Almost 10 grand!
Holy crap.
Y’know, there’s an easy way to learn to write genre novels: sit down and start writing. Write until you’re blue in the face. Impose on some readers who like the kind of nonsense you’re churning out (one of the honored faculty in this program writes fan-fiction, no less! 🙄 ). Extract honest responses from them. Listen. Revise. Get them (or someone) to read the revisions. Listen. Revise. Repeat until you can’t do it any more.
Then either find a publisher (good luck with that) or publish the thing yourself. Then learn to be a marketing exec.
You could buy one whole helluva lot of editorial review and commentary from first-rate genre editors for ten grand. Matter of fact, you could probably fund reviews and coaching for ten novels with that.
{sigh} On that note, I must get back to work for my own wannabe (and real) writers. 😮
What great photos! They make me miss the big back yard at the old place. But here I’ve got a kitchen pantry, linen closet and central heat/air, so it’s a good trade-off.
The only brand of chicken broth I like is called Saffron Road. Around here and in Chicago I could only find it at Whole Foods. They do have a low sodium variety and the Nutrition Info notes 140 mg sodium/per 1 cup serving.
I’ve become quite the connoisseur of chicken broth since I’ve had to drink so much of it over the past year; with every one of the (now four) bouts of diverticulitis I’ve had, liquids only is a requirement for the first day or two. 🙁
Saffron Road also makes a vegetable and a lamb broth, but I’m not sure if either of them are low sodium. Give ’em a try if you can find it and see if it’s to your liking.
Yes, I finally found some of that at our WF. And the lamb broth!!
Both also tasted a little cardboardy to me…not as bad as others, but not very tempting.
My trouble, I guess, is that in my younger days I always used to have a stash of bones in the freezer. Every few weeks I’d make up some broth — either purely chicken broth or else a mix of whatever happened to be in there. And I’ll tellya: THAT was good chicken broth!!!!
Lacking a man and a child and a tribe of friends to cook for these days, I don’t eat that much meat anymore. And when I do, I tend to buy boneless.
Maybe I should relent, though.
A great chicken broth, if you don’t want to collect bones over several weeks, can be had from chicken legs and thighs. Sometimes you can get these on sale, especially if you’re willing to forego the organic type. Today I think the quality of the factory-farmed meats is questionable…and a package of free-range organic chicken is so bracingly pricy, one hardly feels inclined to boil all the flavor out of the meat.
Mmmmm…. SO good, though. One of these days I’ll post what I can recall of my old recipe (such as it was) for making chicken broth.