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This is great.

Ok, I had meant to post the cookie recipe I tried out last week, but I haven’t gotten around to scanning the card, so instead how about this recipe for Tapioca Pudding Salad, which I don’t ever plan to make. But if you like this sort of thing, it seems like a summery dish to serve at your next potluck or circle — as this apparently was (a double-recipe, even!):

I’m not so much a fan of tapioca pudding* or of Jell-o (gelatin) salads more generally. Still, the whole Jell-o salad phenomenon kind of fascinates me, and it seems like it could be a fun little research project.

However. I have other stuff that needs to get done (and there’s probably a book on this somewhere already), so I’ll content myself with these few tidbits:

First, according to the Jell-o history website (”The History of the Wiggle“),

Gelled or “congealed” salads became very popular around this time, with almost one-third of the salad recipes in the average cookbook gelatin-based. This led to the introduction of Lime JELL-O® gelatin in 1930, a flavor well-suited to salads, appetizers, relishes, and entrees.

One third of salad recipes gelatin-based?! There are probably multiple reasons for this trend, which probably involve advertising, working women, and WWII ration-wise recipes, but this explanation on chowhound also grabbed my attention:

[Jell-o salads] ARE history! You might not remember the 50s or the years before when grocery stores were the size of today’s convenience stores and produce wasn’t trucked all over the country much less from the rest of the world. Especially in the winter, your older relatives made “salads” from whatever they could to provide a little tangy, vinegary taste as part of the meal. Sometimes that was nothing much more than cabbage, shredded carrot, raisin, apples, mayo, pineapple, a sorry head of iceberg** or jello. Waldorf salad was pretty common. Pineapple slices with mayo and cherries. Canned bartlett pears with shredded cheddar. Restaurants got fancy with iceberg wedges and blue cheese dressing.

I know all that sounds bizarre today - a mere 50 or 60 years later - but that was the reality for us then. Even when I lived in rural Missouri in the mid-70s, good Romaine in the dead of winter was a reason for celebration.

I must admit this gives me a new sympathy for the idea of Jell-o salad (or “congealed salads,” as the chowhound poster above calls them). But I’m still not likely to make one any time soon. Which leaves me with this dilemma: what can I do with the pretty copper jello molds I’ve inherited?

One friend of mine says that she uses hers to make the decorative ice ring for a punch bowl, which is a great idea, but I don’t have a punchbowl. Can you bake stuff in them without destroying the pan? Ideas?

*According the the Jell-o website, tapioca pudding debuted in 1948.
**pb: maybe this could be a way to use up some of your CSA veggies.

This is from a recent hike up Mt. Tom.  It was a fantastic day for a climb — warm and sunny — but we did get pretty hot after a few hours of climbing. Here, the dogs are cooling off in some puddles from the previous night’s rain.

This was on my way home from campus today:

I attempted making scones from scratch for the first time, using the recipe in my Cook’s Illustrated cookbook, but using buttermilk instead of milk.  I made some of them plain and some with blueberries.  Next time I’ll probably add a tiny bit more sugar (1 Tbsp, maybe) and will sugar the tops (which I only did on some of them this time).

I’m using this post to introduce a new summer blog feature: recipes from this green recipe box:

The recipe box was given to me by Grandma V on one of my visits to the farm. I don’t remember the exact details, but it’s either an extra recipe box that she had sitting around, or it came from a relative. I’m certain that it comes from someone in the family because I recognize many of the “this recipe came from” names written on the recipe cards inside.

I haven’t tried any of the recipes yet, but some of the cookies look interesting. Oh, and if you click through to the big version of this image, I just want to say that I didn’t realize what was sticking up out of the box when I took the picture. I guess the recipe got stuck in backwards, so what you’re seeing here is the back of a recipe clipped from a local farm-related publication called “The Cooperator”.

Well, sort of.  I was in the grocery store while talking on the phone to c… (she was sitting at some airport in Texas), and as I reached for the usual Chocolate Chocolate Chip I noticed a new flavor I hadn’t tried before: Pomegranate Chip.  So I asked c… whether it was worth taking a risk on the new flavor.  In her infinite wisdom, she talked me into getting both, although I felt sort of guilty spending that much money on ice cream.

So, here’s the scoop.  Ahem.  As you can see from the picture, I ended up eating them together, which worked out pretty well.  If I were counting calories, though, I think the raspberry sorbet would work too.  I had a bunch of strawberries I needed to use up, so much of the ice cream was eaten with strawberries on top.

If I must declare a winner, then I’ll say that the Choc Choc Chip is still the reigning favorite in my ice cream universe.  But I’ll also say that the Pomegranate is far superior to the sad pint of Stonyfield Farm (After) Dark Chocolate languishing in my freezer.  I feel capable of appreciating frozen yogurt on its own terms, but if it doesn’t seem fair to compare it to the fatty goodness of Haagen Dazs — well then, fine.  I’ll compare it to the TCBY chocolate I had in the airport a few weeks ago.  The TCBY wins.  No contest.

Oh, and thanks to c…

One of the pleasures of summer vacation is having time to take on some of the projects that had to be put off during the school year. Yesterday I finished unpacking a some stray boxes that had been pushed to the back of the closet, and taking several armloads of stuff (flattened boxes, mostly) down to my storage area. I did some filing and drawer-cleaning and now I have two orderly closets and several tidy desk drawers. There’s still a huge pile of research material in desperate need of organization — which likely be the next project now that the smaller stuff is out of the way.

Another pleasure of early summer is switching from the down duvet to a sheet and a quilt. I love the duvet, but it’s way too hot for summer, and I only have two duvet covers, so by May I’m ready for a change. This weekend we’re supposed to have temps in the low 90s (plus humidity), so I’ve taken that as a sign that it’s time to pack up the duvet and break out the quilts.

Both of my grandmas have given me quilts over the years, and I love looking at the fabric and thinking about how one fabric or another might have come from a dress that my grandma or mom or aunt once wore. In Grandma H’s quilt oeuvre, there are a lot utilitarian quilts — a lot of basic block patterns — of cotton (like the one below) and also heavy, indestructable polyesters (thank you, 1970s). Some of the quilts are tied, some not.

Then there are the decorative quilts: she made a number with hand-embroidered panels, for example. For my mom and dad, she did a whole quilt of Model T and Model A cars; for herself and Grandpa she made one that featured different types of birds (state birds, maybe?). I only have one quilt made by my Grandma V — it’s yellow (below) and she hand-quilted it.

As for myself, I’ve only ever made one quilt — for 8th grade Home Ec. It was a lot of pink flowers. I would post a picture of it, but I believe it lives in Chicago these days (with jtw). I love the idea of making a quilt, but unless someone invents a way for me to do it with Photoshop, that’s a project that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Not even for summer vacation.

My car was stopped next to this truck at a red light the other day. I can only assume this is for some sort of plumber? . . . who removes dogs from toilets?

Made to help celebrate the birthday of a colleague. It’s a layer cake with cream cheese frosting — I had planned to do something more elaborate with the fruit, but ran out of time. Which is to say, I need to make scones or something to use up all of the blueberries I have left over.

First, the not so good:

• 6:45 a.m. flight
• my flight into Athens, GA on a 12-seat plane
• learning that my flight *out* of Athens had been cancelled due to airport closure (which was due to the Air Midwest closure)
• dealing with the airline over the phone in order to sort out #3 (above)

The good:

• getting to see friends/colleagues, and meeting new people
• good keynotes and an excellent conference facility
• plentiful coffee (good, free coffee)
• free wi-fi at the Charlotte airport

Hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend :)

There are a million of these outside my building right now.

I saw this today on my way to the library . . . so that I could work on a paper about multimodal composing and digital video.

One of my students just alerted me to the existence of fora.tv.  Looks like it might be a good resource for topical material (there’s content on digital music + copyright, for example) or for examples of presentations to analyze if your students are doing presentations or studying public speaking.

Hilarious.

The Rather Difficult Font Game.  (I’m amused that the display word they use for a lot of the questions is “fargo.”)

Sorry if this has already made the rounds, but one of my students shared this web design rap with the class, and it’s pretty impressive.

Dear Target,

I can’t help but notice that the boxes of Flor carpet tiles in my local Target store don’t seem to be selling very well.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to take advantage of a clearance markdown, but I don’t really need carpet right now.  And I like the idea of the Flor tiles, so I kind of want them to succeed.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion: instead of putting the carpet tiles in the *gardening section* with the flower pots, trowels, fake plants and whatnot, how about putting them in, um, the carpet section?  You know, where all of the *other* carpet is: with the doormats and 5 x 8 area rugs that students buy to put in their dorms and stuff.

Just a thought.

This is really cool: tutoring center behind a store selling pirate stuff.  Chicago has its own tutoring center, and if I lived there, I’d want to try volunteering.