Snow

It is snowing! Tom just left for the woods with the dogs and hopefully it will not take him a half an hour to get there... the weather-men said that a typical 30 min commute may take 3-4 hours in these conditions. So  extrapolating our typical driving to the woods time of 5 min gives about 30 min today. Then the  estimated total time of the morning walk would be then about 90 min with an hour of driving... Would it not be better just to walk to the woods at this point? Well, we'll see how much time will Tom actually take for this morning walk and decide for the future...

Why am I making all the time calculations at this moment? Well,  I'm worried because Tom told me I cannot start working on my paper until he's back from the walk in the woods. What if it takes him the full 90 min or more to get back?

Happy New Year!

This is the last day of the year and the time for reflections, celebrations and resolutions. My New Year resolution is to make my blog entries more frequent. My last entry was in January 2011 about granola.... I have already eaten that granola!  Was this  the most interesting and important thing to document in 2011?  Not really, even if this was my first ever and possibly the only one granola making event. So 2012 will be better... My resolution is to make at least one entry per month! Maybe it will not feel like the time is running so fast with this increased frequency of postings. Hope my followers be happy!

Here is my last blog entry for 2011 summarizing the biggest event which was not documented until today....


The kitchen renovations are almost done. We moved back to the kitchen on Christmas Eve. Aga helped in moving boxes from the basement up to the new cabinets. She made a few nice decisions on where to place pots, plates and different pantry items. She even divided pantry food by ethnicity, so now I have  Italian shelf, Asian shelf, jams and preserves shelf, baking shelf etc. I still have trouble finding what I need in the kitchen and some things are not at the right place, but the kitchen now is a great place to be. People usually hang-out in the kitchen, so now this place is big enough for a relatively large group.

So now I am writing this entry in the new kitchen and realized I forgot again to prepare the frozen croissants on the tray for baking in the morning... They are still in the freezer!  They need 8 hours to rise, so they do need to wait until 2012 to be baked.

Happy New Year!

My first granola!

I finally made my first granola today. It was easy! I merge/combine the two recipes from NY Times.
3 cups of large oats, 1 cup of mixed nuts (pecans, walnuts and almonds), 1/4 of coconut flakes,
1/2 cup of olive oil, 1/4 cup honey, 1/4 maple syrup,  1/2 teaspon kosher salt,  1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 2 teaspoon of cinnamon - mixed together, spread on the parchment paper and bake in the oven at 300F for about 45 min. Needs to be stirred every 10-15 min.  After it is done move to a large pan add
1/2 cup of dried apricots cut, and 1/2 cup of dried cranberries. Mixed and cool down.
We tried it warm on top of the yogurt. I'm sure it'll be better tomorrow morning for breakfast.
Here are some pictures

Our Old House....

We saw a "for sale" sign posted on a house near the Fells last Friday. Maybe that's a chance to move up closer to the woods and running trails. We went to the open house today. The house is really nicely located, just across from our standard entry to the woods. It is also renovated and nice looking up on the hill. We went for a tour... It was good to look out from the upstairs windows to the other houses and the woods. The kitchen has been updated. The house has all hardwood floors and a lot of space, and closets space too. Yard is smaller, but would probably be o.k. for the dogs. All nice and good overall... But then we went back to our old house and it felt so much nicer! Even with our old structures and the dog room. We are staying here in our old house and the dogs are happy. We could not figure out where we would have a dog room in the new house and how could we move the dogs there to a completely new place and far away from Bernie and the cookies....
However, one decision was made today. We are going to start updating our old house :-)

Tasting events

Whisky tasting is done. Now time for more healthy choices. I found that one needs to try "olive tastings" and see the difference between the oils. Check this article
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/dining/17curious.html?_r=1

by Harold McGee -  the author of "On Food and Cooking - the Science and Lore of the Kitchen".
So, now I need to find the tasting event to go to or suggest to the Harvard Stats. Dept. for the next semester. Not sure whether this California group did any statistical correlation analysis of the oils...
It would be interesting to see some clustering and grouping of different cooking oils.

Whisky

I went to the Harvard Statistics Dept lecture on classifications of whisky (this is the right spelling outside the US) by professor from St.Andrew's University in Scotland. There was a part describing the process of making the whisky, a bit on the history of whisky in England and around the world, and finally a description of statistical methods the lecturer used to classify the whisky based on assumed 10 categories of flavors. Of course there was whisky tasting after the lecture with a few types representing each of the categories. I have tasted a wide range of flavors and could finally see some differences between the famous brands. I'm not sure I would buy the most expensive one :-)  And I found my favorites

Wakeup Alarms

Tom has set up a morning alarm on his droid to sounds of seagulls.  When you hear these birds it makes you feel like you were by the sea. A  nice way to wake up. Of course you need to react fast and stop it. If not you get the nasty sounds of different ring tones.... This really gets you up.
This morning I woke up to a sound of tapping... It was like flamenco taps! First I thought that somebody was practicing  steps. But as I looked out from the bedroom window I saw a little bird, woodpecker pecking on our fence! I took a camera and have a few nice shots for our album of wildlife around the house. Now I am awake at 6.30 in the morning.