It's Friday again
May. 25th, 2018 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillI took the weedeater out for its second run today, and it performed reasonably well. I ran it on the lowest setting for about 20 minutes and cleared out a path along the back fence, running the battery down about 2/3 in the process. Since this is the kind of battery that takes no hurt from being repeatedly recharged from a partial charge, and *can* be damaged by being run down to empty, I took this as a hint to go put it on the charger.
There is something about using the weedeater that tires my arms out a great deal. It isn't that heavy; pushing the lawnmower should be much harder. But when I finished I felt like I could hardly lift my arms and my hands were trembling so hard I had to kind of rest them against my face to take my earplugs out. Maybe it's the angle I hold it at. I have lengthened the shaft as long as it will go, but I still have to kind of reach out forward with it.
Anyway, I also walked 2 miles to retrieve my car from the shop this morning, did a load of laundry in the afternoon and did some work on a song I'm calling Long Time Gone. It's got weird chord combinations that I think Peter Alway would like. :-)
I also skyped with my cousin Maaike in the afternoon and she told me about wortelburgers.
Now, wortel means carrot in Dutch. It also means root. Apparently carrots are sort of the ur-root in the Dutch psyche or something. In this case these are sort of hamburger substitutes made of the following ingredients:
carrots
something Maaike described as "nuts" which I originally thought were hazelnuts. A certain amount of poking around on the internet has led me to believe that they were probably chickpeas. Right shape, wrong family.
(Chickpeas, oddly enough, are called kikkererwten. Kikkers are frogs. Erwten are peas. So what we call chickpeas, they call frogpeas. I guess it makes just as much sense.)
egg
cheese,
breadcrumbs or bits of torn up bread.
I had carrots and an egg, and bread around the house, and grated cheese and chickpeas are things I use regularly so I went to the store for the missing ingredients and gave it a try.
I was totally guessing on the proportions because Maaike is a teenager and not all that interested in cooking, so I used 4 ounces of carrots, grated in the food processor, 2 ounces of (cooked--in this case canned) chickpeas, chopped in the food processor, one slice of bread torn to pieces, one large handful grated cheese and 1 egg to start with. This mix seemed a bit dry so I upped it to two eggs, but that was a bit sloppy; maybe I should have had the courage of my convictions and stuck to one egg.
I divided the ingredients into four parts, rolled each into a ball and mashed it flat to a burger (the sloppiest part of this process because I just reached in with my bare hands) and set the 4 burgers in a fry pan with some olive oil.
I had just set up my Apple Watch with a 90 second timer as one of the complications on one of my watch faces. I'm going to need a 90 second timer when I am timekeeper at the next League of Women Voters forum (the invitation letters for which ate half of yesterday and taught me new, *mostly* positive things about my printer) and I thought it would be nice to be able to run it from my watch instead of having to use my iPhone for it. This cooking gig proved a great way to test it. About 3 minutes on each side with the heat set on 5 browned the tops and bottoms of the carrot burgers nicely.
I finished with a quick splash of water and set the lid on to let it steam, then removed it from the heat and let it cool to eating temperature in the pan.
The results: perfectly adequate but a bit boring. Some onion wouldn't go amiss, I think, and perhaps a little garlic, and some sesame oil. I will try the recipe again sometime and keep the two burgers I didn't eat for dinner for breakfast.
There is something about using the weedeater that tires my arms out a great deal. It isn't that heavy; pushing the lawnmower should be much harder. But when I finished I felt like I could hardly lift my arms and my hands were trembling so hard I had to kind of rest them against my face to take my earplugs out. Maybe it's the angle I hold it at. I have lengthened the shaft as long as it will go, but I still have to kind of reach out forward with it.
Anyway, I also walked 2 miles to retrieve my car from the shop this morning, did a load of laundry in the afternoon and did some work on a song I'm calling Long Time Gone. It's got weird chord combinations that I think Peter Alway would like. :-)
I also skyped with my cousin Maaike in the afternoon and she told me about wortelburgers.
Now, wortel means carrot in Dutch. It also means root. Apparently carrots are sort of the ur-root in the Dutch psyche or something. In this case these are sort of hamburger substitutes made of the following ingredients:
carrots
something Maaike described as "nuts" which I originally thought were hazelnuts. A certain amount of poking around on the internet has led me to believe that they were probably chickpeas. Right shape, wrong family.
(Chickpeas, oddly enough, are called kikkererwten. Kikkers are frogs. Erwten are peas. So what we call chickpeas, they call frogpeas. I guess it makes just as much sense.)
egg
cheese,
breadcrumbs or bits of torn up bread.
I had carrots and an egg, and bread around the house, and grated cheese and chickpeas are things I use regularly so I went to the store for the missing ingredients and gave it a try.
I was totally guessing on the proportions because Maaike is a teenager and not all that interested in cooking, so I used 4 ounces of carrots, grated in the food processor, 2 ounces of (cooked--in this case canned) chickpeas, chopped in the food processor, one slice of bread torn to pieces, one large handful grated cheese and 1 egg to start with. This mix seemed a bit dry so I upped it to two eggs, but that was a bit sloppy; maybe I should have had the courage of my convictions and stuck to one egg.
I divided the ingredients into four parts, rolled each into a ball and mashed it flat to a burger (the sloppiest part of this process because I just reached in with my bare hands) and set the 4 burgers in a fry pan with some olive oil.
I had just set up my Apple Watch with a 90 second timer as one of the complications on one of my watch faces. I'm going to need a 90 second timer when I am timekeeper at the next League of Women Voters forum (the invitation letters for which ate half of yesterday and taught me new, *mostly* positive things about my printer) and I thought it would be nice to be able to run it from my watch instead of having to use my iPhone for it. This cooking gig proved a great way to test it. About 3 minutes on each side with the heat set on 5 browned the tops and bottoms of the carrot burgers nicely.
I finished with a quick splash of water and set the lid on to let it steam, then removed it from the heat and let it cool to eating temperature in the pan.
The results: perfectly adequate but a bit boring. Some onion wouldn't go amiss, I think, and perhaps a little garlic, and some sesame oil. I will try the recipe again sometime and keep the two burgers I didn't eat for dinner for breakfast.
