|
|
|
reviving an old bagel
Friday, November 6 2026
I had a single bagel left from a batch I'd bought several weeks ago, and it had traveled a great distance for a bagel, having been up to the cabin and back. It had also spent a week in the freezer after I'd forgotten to take it on one of my trips to the cabin. Today I committed myself to eating it no matter what. But as I cut it in half, it was so dry that it was like sawing through a dog toy. It needed to be toasted to be any good, but toasting it would just drive off more water. So before toasting, I trickled water into the driest part of each of the separated hemitoroids (around the outside, as this particular bagel barely had a polar hole). Once toasted, I spread a flavored cream-cheese-like product on the cut surfaces. The result was much better than expected; I'd successfully brought the bagel back to fully human-edible. You can be sure I will be using this technique in the future. It's a lifehack I stumbled upon entirely by myself.
The warm weather kept me occasionally revisiting my nearby stone walls (the Woodshed Path and eastern part of the Chamomile Walls) today to add yet more stones. Neither of these walls can ever really be finished, but some parts need more work than others. On the Woodshed Path Wall, the goal is to beef up the wall through the steeper-sloped sections in places where it was difficult to lay down anything but a thin trace of stone. On the Chamomile Wall, my concern is more about weak foundations along the bottom of the north-facing side, particularly between buttresses that have now been in place for as long as five or six years. The warm weather has brought out a fair amount of wildlife, including a red eft, a large ground spider of some species, and small striped salamanders I normally find under rocks that had actually come out from under them on their own.
This evening Gretchen cooked up some broccoli and heated some frozen pizza and we ate that while watching Jeopardy! and the crazy penultimate episode of the first season of The Mayor of Kingstown where a men's prison erupts into a riot. After that I took my second bath of the week. I probably won't be going to the cabin until early next week, after a hybrid charge controller I've ordered arrives.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?261106 feedback
previous | the future |
