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intruding into the throw-away part of asparagus
Wednesday, May 6 2026
It was cool and rainy for much of the day, keeping me from doing outdoor chores, and our house cleaner was here for four hours beginning at 10:30am, which bottled me and the dogs (and even both cats) up in the laboratory for that whole time. (It's a good thing my laboratory has a urinal and a tea pot!)
After the cleaner was gone, I went down to the garage and cut that ten foot long 1.5 inch galvanized steel pipe into two five foot long pieces. I didn't have the best tools for the job and the one I used, a 120v angle grinder, was probably not as good as, say, the DeWalt abrasive chop saw that I inherited from my mother. It took awhile to do all that cutting, and I was concerned that the constant shower of sparks might've set something (such as a pile of Chewy boxes) on fire. But eventualy I'd cut through enough of the steel for the two pieces to break apart.
On Monday I'd had so much trouble cooking dried white beans in the InstantPot (using the pressure-cooker feature) that I'd given up and used chickpeas in the curry I was making instead. But eventually, after something like an hour and a half of pressure cooking, the beans were good. Today I decided to turn those beans into a soup. I cut up some potatoes and boiled them in broth in a frying pan while gradually adding other soup vegetables that didn't need as much cooking. This included some broccoli rab shoots and leaves that had grown up from stems buried over the winter in the garden. (I had to work hard to remove all the little slugs that were already attacking them.) Then I added the asparagus I'd bought yesterday. As an experiment, I used Gretchen's method of bending the asparagus stem to see where it broke and then deliberately intruding about an inch into the the part of the stem that would normally be thrown away using that method and included that extra in the soup. When I thought all that was cooked enough, I added it to he pot of white beans along with things like diced tomatoes (crushed would've been better) and some bean juice from some dried black beans I'd cooked in the InstantPot last week. The result was a stew with a surprisingly thick broth. I thought it was great, though it was clear in talking about it with Gretchen that she thought all the vegetables had been overcooked. She hadn't even noticed it contained asparagus.
Between when I'd made the soup and when Gretchen came home from the bookstore, I tried to take Charlotte for a walk down the Stick Trail. But it was raining a little, and that was too much for her, and she abandoned me just south of the Chamomile Wall. So I turned back around and came home.
Later I tried reading more of Artemis in the bathtub. But my glasses kept fogging up, and I'd only get about ten more seconds of reading from them by dipping them in the warm tub water. So I had to give up on that.
Despite being on 150mg of diphenhydramine, I stayed up very late drinking kratom tea and doing fiddly little fixes to my ESP8266 Firmware, adding a way to retrieve information about how statistically long major regular operations were taking and improving the robustness of serial logging.
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