The Winotech VoluMaster 9000™

Necessity is the mother of ugly, brutish invention. The volume control for an otherwise high-quality, much-liked set of computer speakers needed replacement. Radio Shack provided the innards, and Sam Ash Music provided the guitar volume knob. After some guessing about how to wire it (no thanks to the total lack of a wiring diagram), the craftsmen of Orange Wino Laboratories & Bakery got it to work.
And just to remind everyone who surfs the internets how cool I am, that's Highway to Hell that I used for test music.

This is what we do on Superbowl Sunday

Football? What the hell is football? Sounds vaguely familiar, but it just doesn't quite register....
Anyway,to support the shampoo shelf while the thinset cures, I drove a screw into the wall and used a string and a binder clip which, of course, I did not steal from work.

Rocks at Eye Level

I'll probably end up taking long showers, using a lot of hot water in the process, because I'll be staring at the rocks we've mortared to the wall.

Click on the picture. It takes you in close.

Cannelloni di Portabelli with Red Pepper/Goat Cheese Sauce

This is an example of ingredients dictating dinner. We had a some red bell peppers and a whole bunch of portabello mushrooms. Lindz wanted to do something special for dinner, something Italian. Talk of a pasta dish naturally followed, and the comforting nature of a baked pasta dish appealed to us.

We went to Trader Joe's for various groceries and the other ingredients for our meal. We were also hoping to catch my brother at work. We added things to our cart, and details of the meal appeared in my head. A baked pasta dish during winter demands to be shared, so we asked Bryan over for dinner. The time was around noon when we left the store.

I spent much of the afternoon in the kitchen, and it was a pleasant afternoon indeed. I made some pasta dough (it's pretty standard, but I always use the recipe from a well-used, stained page of Pasta Improvvisata) and put it in the fridge. I blackened some red bell peppers under the broiler and peeled them. I cleaned the portabellos and grabbed my knife, and I soon had a mountain of chopped mushrooms. I sweated them down in my beloved iron deep skillet with a bulb's worth of minced garlic and a few handfuls of frozen spinach. The skillet was actually called a chicken fryer when I bought it, but the item I've hyperlinked to is almost identical. I put the reduced mushroom/garlic/spinach mixture, salted and peppered, in the fridge.

I attached my pasta roller (a birthday gift from Lindz) to the Kitchenaid mixer and took the wad of dough from the fridge. I rolled out a bunch of thin sheets and put them on cookie cooling racks to dry (in the process, reminding myself how little counter space the kitchen has). Proceeding according to Signore Batali's cannelloni technique in Molto Italiano, I boiled a pot of water and prepared an ice bath. I cooked the sheets (each 4" or 5" by 6") and shocked them in the ice bath.

Bryan arrived and was soon sipping a beer at the table, perusing cookbooks. I mixed an egg into the mushroom mixture, and Lindz helped me fill the cannelloni. She placed a nugget of goat cheese on top of the spoonful of mushroom filling on each pasta sheet, and I rolled them up and put them in a baking dish (two baking dishes, actually; we ended up with quite a few). I put the dishes of naked cannelloni in the fridge and turned my attention to the sauce.

I pureed the roasted red peppers in the food processor with a bit of salt and pepper. Lindz suggested that I add the remaining hunk of goat cheese, so into the red vortex it went. The creamy tang was evident in the finished product - very nice. I heated up a saucepan and turned on the oven. I made a roux and added some chicken stock (I had no milk for besciamella), and when it thickened, I added the pepper puree. I hope there's no law against topping cannelloni with veloute instead bechamel.

Lindz toasted some walnuts and made salads for us. We opened a bottle of wine, too - Epicuro Aglianico Beneventano 2004, $5.99 at Trader Joe's. It's a delicious bottle, one for which I'd be happy to pay $15. The pear-Gorgonzola salad dressing also came from The Joe.

I poured the sauce over the two baking dishes of cannelloni (the one pictured above is the more handsome dish, an Emile Henry), grated some Parmiggiano-Reggiano over them, and put them into a 375 degree oven. We ate our salads (baby greens, feta, dried blueberries, toasted walnuts and the dressing), and I pulled the cannelloni out of the oven when it was bubbly, about half an hour.

I was pleased with the results -it was tasty and comforting oven Italian, and it tasted like its ingredients. It also provided a very nice afternoon's activity for me. I'm glad Lindz wanted Italian. Next time, I'll actually go out and get some milk. Besciamella would have been better. We followed dinner with some vanilla Joe-Joe's, and then we watched Annie Hall.

A New Member of the Family

Meet Victor Laszlo. Lindz got him on Monday, and I decided that he would need a name of distinction.

I'm told that this is a feisty breed of fish, so woe shall beset the errant knave that tries to rob our house.

The Sides

There's no better way to relax after a busy work week than tiling. Lindz and I are now concentrating on the sides of the shower surround, with the hopes that the tiles will meet up in the middle. We are optimistic.
The right:

The left:

Much to my satisfaction, I installed the shower valve at the correct depth. I also managed to make a tile fit around it (only breaking one in the process):

MORE TILING ACTION THAN YOU CAN HANDLE!

(listening to "She's a Jar" by Wilco)
Yes, we're very cool people. This is what we do on the weekends. Every single weekend since Jesus was a corporal, it seems. It's been a very long time since a shower has taken place in this bathroom.


(listening to "Please Don't Talk About Murder While I'm Eating" by Ben Harper)
I spent a good bit of time at the tile saw today. I had to make the cuts to accommodate two shelves and the soap dish. It's a wet tile saw, so one gets a mixture of water and tile dust flying around. The tile dust is brown. By the time I finished all those cuts, I looked like I either got a great tan or was a native Pakistani. My hair was nice and gritty, too.

We're getting closer to completion all the time.
Changing the subject, I feel the need to describe what I'm drinking. I put some dried blueberries in the bottom of a cocktail shaker and added a bit of dry white wine to soften them. I smashed them up with a muddler and added a couple ounces of Absolut Pears vodka and some ice. I shook it and dumped the result, smashed blueberries and all, into a martini glass. It's quite tasty, albeit somewhat more foo-foo of a tipple than I usually drink. Lindz, a friend and I had something similar at the Duck & Dumpling last night. Last night's drink was excellent. The main difference is that last night's drink had regular vodka instead of pear. It was also ten bucks. It was worth every penny; we had a splendid time. Good Mooshu Duck. Good Crabcake. Good Green Papaya Salad with Grilled Lemongrass Flank Steak. The Tuna Tartar was too heavy on the wasabi, regrettably. Nevertheless, go and eat there. Immediately.

Meat & Potatoes

Grilled ribeye steak
Grilled red bell peppers
Gnocchi with garlic oil, spinach, walnuts and parmiggiano reggiano

I Hope Tile Dust Doesn't Cause Cancer

Lots of tile cutting. Almost there.

THE @#&*?! TILES ARE ALL IN PLACE

If you look closely, you will notice that we've done a bit of grout, too. Grouting among the river rocks will take a bit of time, but the wall will be transformed.

This trowel has worked very hard. It gives me great pleasure to put him out to pasture.

Lindz and I have worked extra hard on this the past few weekends. What remains? Grouting, attaching the fixtures, caulking and installing a recessed light in the ceiling.
This would be a good time to commit a crime; we've worn our fingerprints off.

Better Light

I installed a recessed light fixture in the ceiling Monday night. I should have done it at the beginning of this whole project; we can see better to work, and the pics look better.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Almost done.

Dinner with my brother

Chicken piccata. This was a long-overdue dinner with Bryan, especially welcome after many dinners of processed foods, take-out or hastily thrown-together things as the result of working on the bathroom. Somehow the idea of this tasty dish arrived in his head, and he came over to prepare it. Lindz and I had spent the day working in the bathroom (we may be able to shower in the master bath, for the first time in some 18 months, in a day or two), and it was very nice to observe St. Patrick's Day in a more epicurean way.
The food was great, and it was very nice indeed to cook with the bro. He and I cooked it together. We all drank copiously and talked copiously, as it should be.

The recipe for chicken piccata was executed from The New Best Recipe. Lovely, simple, tangy goodness. During the course of the evening we polished off a bottle of Three Philosophers. We also enjoyed a wee bit of Absolut Rasberri, a nice tipple.

Too Tired to Think of a Title

Credits

Lindz and I didn't have any of the bathroom remodel professionally done. It was a family job. She and I lived with the project, but it would not have happened without her parents. They provided a huge amount of support (both moral and elbow-grease), and I probably wouldn't have had the courage to demolish an entire room of our house without Hub's "That's not a problem; we can fix that" mentality.

The first shower has been taken

Everything seems to be working. I wanted to document it with photos, but Lindz resisted that idea. She locked the bathroom door and wouldn't let me in with the camera.

It was a hell of a lot of work. We could have taken shortcuts. I remember what my late paternal grandfather used to say about this sort of thing. He'd tell me, in his singsong Italian accent, "Well, eef you're gonna beeld a-sometheenk, eet might as well really be a-sometheenk."*

It seemed strange going into the master bathroom with the intention of showering, just as it would seem strange to go into the pantry with that intention. For such a long time, it has been a place of work, not of bathing.




*My grandpa never really said this, nor did he have an exaggerated Italian accent.

Just get the hell out of office already, you crook

I haven't bitched about this moron in a long time. I guess I just need isolate myself from any form of news if I don't want to be outraged.

Pretzels

(listening to "Cortege et Litanie," by Marcel Dupre)
I can't come up with a word that describes the way fresh pretzels smell. It's bread, but there is something else there. Pretzels are bathed in hot, slightly alkaline water before they are baked (for the glossy skin and chewy texture). Perhaps that makes the smell slightly different, but I don't know how to describe it. It smells like it did when I made pretzels with my late grandmother as a kid. Exactly the same. I baked these pretzels for a potluck at work, but I felt some very personal emotions when I made them. These feelings were strong when I struggled with the elastic dough, seeking the perfect amount of flour on my hands. Grandma's knobby hands, with their flowerpetal-delicate skin, subdued the dough with infuriating ease. You are not a true master of something before you've done it a lot. Her pretzels were slender, shiny and consistent. They were laid out to cool on towels beneath the high ceiling of the bright farmhouse kitchen. It was a thousand years ago, and it was this morning.
I squeezed mustard onto one at midnight, and I felt that I had not wasted my time and flour.
As with my stollen, the pretzels taste pretty decent, but they are uglier than Grandma's. It is my fond wish that people eat them and are happy. I would hope that Grandpa would have given a herzlich "Ausgezeichnet."

Fruhling

It's Friday, and I'm drinking Schneider Weisse.



Lindz took some pics in the yard earlier this week. It's been unseasonably warm and lovely this week, but I just finished putting a tarp over a bunch of new plants in the hopes that this newly arrived cold snap won't kill them.

Red and Green: The Stark Duality of Existence

I took this picture through our kitchen window. Minutes earlier, I helped my neighbor lift a pine tree 10" in diameter (it used to live right next to the leaning one you see here) off of his minivan. Minor damage. It was a sudden burst of wind that did it, and it yanked some shingles off of another neighbor's roof. Our house was sheltered by trees, fortunately. I'm able to lift a tree trunk because I'm so big and tough. And the tree was rotten. And I sawed the log in half. And I had help.
I made stuffed peppers because Lindz suggested the idea. When she makes a suggestion, it always turns out to be a good one. Except when she suggested General Tso's Marshmallow Peeps. That sucked.
I used the technique from The New Best Recipe.

Mein Camp

This weekend, I camped with some folks from work. One of these folks has a piece of land near Swansboro, and a fine campsite it is. It probably won't be so pleasant in August, but it's perfect in April.

He's also got a boat down there, and we spotted this ocean sunfish a few miles off shore:

The dolphins always dove before I could catch them.

The dock and storage shed are the only structures on the property. It was a very fine getaway.

Seriously?

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

Up in Michigan (some random pics)

My brother and I drove up to Michigan. In Ohio, we purchased a bunch of fireworks for the delight of our nephews and ourselves. Here's one lighting up the sky above our elder brother's back yard:

This is the bathroom I shared with my siblings as a child. I believe it's original to the 1964 construction of the house. One doesn't find lavender toilets, tubs and sinks very often anymore.

Here is part of the slate backsplash in my sister and brother-in-law's new basement kitchen. The basement is gorgeous, and there are no purple fixtures.

The reason for our journey was the baptism of our new niece, Cecilia. It was a beautiful day, and she is a beautiful baby.

As always, food was crucial to the family visit. I helped my sister make three caramelized onion pizzas for the baptism lunch. Here's the first one out of the oven:

It was goooood. We drank plenty of beer with it, such as Bell's Pale Ale, Bell's Amber Ale and, most importantly, the dedicatory homebrew: Petite Merde Transverse Brown Ale. There was plenty of food of all sorts, and lots of family & friends.

Up in Michigan 2

Our late maternal grandmother had an incredible collection of salt & pepper shakers. Grandpa built the display cabinet.

I found this sign at a store in Frankenmuth. It's virtually identical to one that our late paternal grandparents had in their front porch area (my sister has that one in her guest room now). I hung it on our porch in Raleigh.

This is Delphi. However, it is Steering Gear to us. It was Saginaw Division of General Motors. Our dad worked there for 34 years. I left the picture file full-size for detail.

This 1967 ranch is the house is the first house I ever lived in. It still has the same sycamore tree out front. Our family lived here for 11 years before moving to the house where our mother still lives today.

But enough about the past. Here is my eldest nephew, standard-bearer of our family's next generation, lighting fireworks in the sandbox:

And here is my eldest niece bouncing on the trampoline:

The next project

This is the next target of our nesting-on-steroids campaign. It will be a different project than remodeling the bathroom, since we don't have another kitchen. We won't be able to drag the project out over a year.



There are lots of cute shows on HGTV about remodeling, and Lowe's or Home Depot are more than happy to give you a bunch of catalogs full of expensive shit. I wish some of it pertained to our kitchen. The USA's home improvement marketing machine doesn't have the dinky galley kitchen on its radar. I don't pretend to be surprised, just annoyed. I took the two pictures above while standing in the same spot. This is a small kitchen. It's nice and efficient for one cook, but it bears no resemblance to the vast rooms full of custom cabinetry that fill magazines and catalogs. I'd like to make some aspects of it more space-efficient; perhaps IKEA will have some options. Our kitchen is huge by European standards.

Anyway, we're thinking Corian or some solid counter top material, a big, deep, single bowl sink that takes less counter space than the present shallow two-bowler, apothecary glass cupboard doors, and perhaps a new window. We're replacing the Reagan-Era dishwasher anyway.

Our house is a modest, comfortable ranch. Tearing out walls and doing a dream kitchen would cost more money than we'd ever get back from a buyer, so we're going to be moderate. It will be a harder project to live with than the bathroom, though.

Beef Penis

So Friggin' Pleasant

Lindz and I spent Memorial Day weekend at Lake Norman. It's kind of like a Caribbean resort at her parents' condo, but no one tries to sell us weed, and the drinks are cheaper. We're always so grateful to be so near this escape. Unfortunately, our drive to the lake sometimes coincides with a NASCAR race. A race creates hateful traffic stretching into all the neighboring counties. The travel and expense that racing fans will undertake puzzles me; I can watch people drive too fast and swerve in front of each other during my commute every day. At least there's some possibility of punishment in NASCAR.

Thankfully, we missed the traffic this weekend. This is only theoretical bitching.

Entertainment for a Rainy Afternoon

We like bing cherries. They just happen to go well with cabernet sauvignon.

After years of denouncing it as a unitasker, I purchased a cherry pitter. We like it. I haven't used it on olives yet, but we like this thing anyway. Preliminary tests indicate that this gadget will shoot a cherry pit six feet.

I also finally got us corn picks. A household isn't really established until your guests can hold a cob of corn in style.

Yep, we're happenin' people. We finally got a new dishwasher this afternoon; what better than a good cherry pittin' session to follow that?