I spoke too soon with respect to the weather station. After working fine for a couple of days, it crashed again. Luckily I have a back up rain gauge of the unbreakable variety. There’s a quick restart method and the full factory reset which is what I used last time. I think I’ll hit it with the quick restart and then a hammer.
Nancy made something new the other night, mashed parmesan cauliflower. It’s a great substitute for mashed potatoes which I liked it much better. You make it exactly the same as you would mashed potatoes except adding parmesan for flavor. So now we have mashed parsnips and mashed cauliflower added to our menu. I’ll try to get her to try using the same recipe when the Romanesque crop comes in next month. Romanesque is a combination of broccoli and cauliflower; green color and the texture of cauliflower. With another cauliflower, she made roast cauliflower soup. That’s a first too. If we’re not careful we’ll slip into vegan-hood without even trying.
Today she made “over the hill” broccoli cheese soup. A broccoli plant puts out a large main head which is what you see in the grocery store then, after the main head is harvested, it puts out branches of florets a couple of weeks after the first cutting. The first couple cutting of the florets yields nice tight tops that we roast, fry, eat raw or whatever but the plant tries to replace each floret cut with several more. Those get wimpier and wimpier as the plant wears itself out trying to produce seeds. In the final stages you have to pick every day to keep the florets from blooming and turning into seed. This last round of florets I call the “over the hill broccoli” and it ends up in the soup pot. A good variety will produce for a couple of months. Then I pull the plant and chop it up into the compost pile to feed next season’s crop. Nothing wasted. We freeze most of the soup and break it out on an as needed basis.
A few notes on the Olympics. I’m not a big winter Olympics person but just listening to the news, I picked up on a few things. I guess the US speed skaters didn’t do well and are blaming it on new, high tech uni’s. Since speed skating is a timed event, it would seem that the numbers would show right away, during training, during practice but for sure, before an actual race. So I’m not really buying the uni story. Wasn’t that the same issue with swimmers during the summer Olympics? That’s the argument for nude olympics which would draw an even bigger audience. The Norwegians are blaming their wax man for their cross country losses. Big surprise, there’s controversy about judging figure skating. Has there ever been an Olympics where figure skating judging hasn’t been contested? It’s because the Olympic games are about sports and figure skating isn’t a sport, it’s an exhibition, a performance. It would be like having ballet as an Olympic event. If you can’t measure it, it’s not a sport or athletic competition.
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