Re: Smashed Avocado on Toast

On Wed, 12 Jun 2024 03:40:26 -0500, vickiebee
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Wow Joy, I almost think you're pulling my leg. Are you a truck driver?

A bike rider.

I must have a nap after lunch, or I'm not safe to operate a vehicle.
(I've had a groggy spell in the afternoon ever since I was a
teenager.)

Napping along the road would attract ambulances,

I got my welfare checked on my last long ride -- the one where I drank
the V-8.   While I was eating pizza at my first stop, a policeman told
me that I'd been reported as probably lost.  When I wrote about it in
my diary, I wondered how the citizen had known I was old when too far
off to see the wrinkles -- my helmet and do-rag completely conceal my
gray hair. Then I remembered that I'd walked to the top of the
previous hill, then stood around for a while sending a text and
writing in my notebook.  Plenty of time for someone to jump to a
conclusion.



Saturday 15 June 2024

Been too busy doing to write about it.  Three bike rides one after the
other today, yesterday, and the day before.


Thursday's was supposed to be an all-day ride, so on Wednesday, I put
two spoons of green gunpowder tea into a saucepan.  It's a crime to
treat gunpowder that way, but the only bag tea in the house is
chamomile.  I also have a brick of tea that deserves such treatment,
but I don't want my spouse operating a band saw just now.  I pruned
thyme that is going to seed -- I must find time to cut down the rest
of it and put it into a bag in the freezer for July's tea, and also
cut down the oregano that's starting to bloom and freeze that too.

I cut the thyme into pieces that would fit into the saucepan, using
scissors over the pot, and also sliced a stalk of rhubarb.  It's too
late in the season for eating rhubarb, but it still does for flavoring
tea.  I added a bottle of water, put on a tight lid, turned the fire
to "simmer", and moved it to a pilot light after I smelled it boiling.

The bottle holds twenty ounces, which I believe is pretty close to an
Imperial pint.  I've often wondered how twenty ounces came to be the
standard size for American bike bottles.  (Officially, there is no
standard, but mine all measure twenty ounces.)

In the morning, I strained it into the bottle, added a teeny bit of
honey, replaced the water that had boiled away or soaked into the
vegetable matter with some over-gingered switchel, dressed for the
ride, decided that I had too much to do at home to stay out all day,
put the bottle into the fridge, and struck all but the first two stops
off my itinerary.  I was very glad I had when I rode home into a
ferocious head wind; five miles of that would have sunk me.

The next day, yesterday, I had an afternoon appointment for my
semi-annual checkup.  Felt odd to go out with only one bottle even
though I knew I wouldn't empty it.  (Bikies get paranoid about
hydration after passing out a couple of times.)  I aced all the tests
except maybe the blood tests, the results of which aren't in yet.  [I
passed, but it was close on the cholesterol.]  On the way home, I
stopped at a grocery to redeem a coupon for a free chicken-corn
chowder pie, and got this post back on topic.

It is my habit to buy an avocado whenever they are less than a dollar
each, and small avocados were ninety-nine cents, so I put one into the
cart.  Then I passed the reduced-produce shelf, saw a bag of two
avocados for ninety-nine cents, and put the first avocado back. Turned
out to be a good choice; well over half of one avocado is now in the
fridge, and though only a small piece of the other remained, the pile
of bad spots on the garbage plate added up to much less than half an
avocado even though I'd been quite generous in cutting them out.

A bad choice:  I decided that I didn't want to delay my belated lunch
by thawing sourdough bread in in my very slow toaster, so I zapped a
"bagel thin".  Bagel thins are much too sweet to be good with avocado,
but piling on an overwhelming amount of avocado covered that up.

In the evening, I got out a spare water bottle for my usual Saturday
tour, and discovered that I'd put them away wrapped in paper towels so
that I din't have to scrub one after all.

Today, I got back from my farmers markets tour too early -- we weren't
ready for the three-meat wrap I brought back from the ice-rink market.
I later realized that, distracted by an un-labled event at the
fairgrounds . . . (I asked the person who was first in line and she
didn't know either, except that there were going to be pony rides for
her children.  Not being a customer, I had taken a walk around the
booths that were being set up; seemed to be a craft fair, but there
was also a travel agent.) . . .

I forgot to go to the courthouse market, and came straight back from
the fairgrounds market.

After putting away what I'd bought at the fairgrounds market and
eating my half of the wrap, I decided to get part of Thursday's tour,
took the tea out of the fridge, put the spare bottle in the
un-insulated pannier (paranoid about hydration), and went to Meijer.
It's only four miles away, but it's on this side of Thirty, and
digestive biscuits have been on my shopping list for some time.

Now to see whether I can make what I wrote on Wednesday make sense.


Monday, 17 June 2024

This post would have been much, much shorter had I had time to write
it all in one sitting.

I pruned the thyme yesterday.  Much harder than expected; I don't
think it's ever been aggressively pruned before, it was tangled, and
some of the branches had rooted.  It wouldn't fit into a twelve-quart
mixing bowl (over 10 liters), but half-filled two sandwich bags when
snipped into quarter-inch pieces.  But then, I trimmed it wastefully.
It was too hot to work outside, and too messy to work in the kitchen,
so I ended up doing the job after dark with a battery light.

I had avocado on toasted sourdough bread for lunch today.  And a
cracker cut of gouda cheese, warmed on the toast.

Also yesterday, I remembered that there is a hacksaw on the back of
one of my frozen-food knives.  With that and a hive tool, I got a
chunk off the brick, and also collected enough finely-powdered tea to
make caffienated switchel.  (Now I need to remember how much oat flour
I can put in without making it too thick to drink.)

-- 
joy beeson at centurylink dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGESEW/