I love the combination of flavors and textures. The broth is delicious in itself, but there are add-ins like bean sprouts, cilantro, basil, sliced onions, sauce, and lime wedges that really put it over the top.
Posts made by Mary Anna
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RE: Pho!
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RE: Salads
Strawberry Mac sounds good and it reminds me of a watermelon salad that I had at a friend's house. I've made several variations on it.
The original recipe is chunks of watermelon, slivered onions, chunked feta cheese, sprigs of mint, and an oil and vinegar dressing. The proportions of each are totally up to the cook.
I'm on the fence about the cheese, so I usually leave it out. I'm not wild about mint, so I swap it for dill or cilantro, but basil would also work. I season the oil and vinegar dressing with salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and powdered garlic. (I prefer fresh garlic most of the time and I'm sure it would be amazing in this dish, but it would also make the recipe all about the garlic. The powdered garlic stays in the background better, IMHO. Also the salt, ground black and cayenne peppers, and ground garlic seem to help the vinaigrette emulsify.)
I'm sure this would also be good made with other melons or a medley of them.
This salad is great the first day and arguably better on the second, after the flavors have blended, although this may be more true of my non-cheese version. It doesn't seem like feta would be happy in watermelon juice for very long. A
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RE: Salads
I put eggs in a lot of salads--potato salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, salad nicoise--but not bean salad. I'm thinking about whether I'd like them in bean salad and...I'm thinking no? For bean salad, I don't do much other than marinate the beans in some vinaigrette with maybe some finely onions and herbs.
I don't have any really creative family salad recipes to contribute, because I do the same thing for potato, tuna, and chicken salad and it's not fancy: Mix the main ingredient with chopped boiled eggs, chopped sweet pickles, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and a drizzle of pickle juice.
Oh and for potato salad, I'd fancy it up with a sprinkling of paprika on top.
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RE: Summer 2024
The grass thing with round lavender flowers sounds like some kind of allium. How big are the flower balls and the grassy foliage?
I like the sound of daisy bushes!
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RE: Summer 2024
I doubt I will do much gardening here. The yard is small and I wouldn't do vegetables here, just maybe a few flowers. This house would be good for hanging baskets, part-shade in the front and mostly sun in the back. Our neighbor has pretty hanging flower baskets and I may copy her in front. I could see herbs or a miniature tomato in baskets out back.
There's a rhododendron that's too big for its spot and it's reaching out to scratch our cars and us in the driveway. I'd like to move it to the side or back yard. I think it's pink.
If I decide I miss vegetable gardening too much, there's a wonderful community garden a short walk from the house. If I have a summer when I know I won't be traveling too much, I may get a plot.
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RE: Summer 2024
Since the hydrangeas portion of this thread was posted, I have moved into a house with two big hydrangea bushes. They're both bigleaf, I believe, and they're both blue. (At the moment.)
The one in front of the house is a lacecap, and our soil pH must be right at 7, because a few of the flowers are purple, and I've seen an old photo of the house where that bush was blooming pink.
The one in back of the house, but on the side and visible from the street, is what I think you call a mophead. The flowers are a deep purplish blue.
They're both starting to fade to a pinkish brown, but I like the look of the dried brown heads and plan to leave them. This town seems to be really well-suited to hydrangeas, because lots of people have yards full of them, and I've seen all the varieties I know and some I don't--mophead, lacecap, Annabelle, peewee, climbing, oakleaf, and probably more--and in all the colors hydrangeas come in. The old, established yards of some of the houses near us are really remarkable.
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RE: What to do with older set of china?
I wouldn't hesitate to break it up. If it had sentimental value or if the complete set had the kind of monetary value it would once have had, then maybe not. But now? There aren't any feelings involved and there's no financial value in keeping it together. Keep what you like!
I have never had the never-use-it feeling about fine china and silverware, but I haven't used mine in years, because as empty-nesters, we literally never sit down to a meal. We're now more a bowls-in-front-of-the-TV household. Sometimes that makes me a little sad, because I do enjoy the ceremony of mealtimes. While I never brought out the china and silver for everyday, I did use it for holidays and birthdays and such. Now that we're living where we'll have more family gatherings, I do plan to use it more.
This thread is making me think about moving my sterling flatware into everyday rotation. My china is a little fussy for that, but who knows? Maybe I'll decide it doesn't matter.
My mother used her Franciscanware for special occasions. (At least two forumites have her Apple pattern.) I inherited half of it but just didn't need more china, so I gave it to Muffin's Sister. Now I get to see it once a week when her eldest posts pics of what he cooks on Mondays, his appointed night to be family chef. (What did we call him? Stud Muffin?) It would make Mama happy to know it was being enjoyed.
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RE: Taking up needlework again?
I've done a number of needle arts over the years--crocheting, crewel embroidery, cross-stitch, sewing--but I never got really good at any of them. (This is a metaphor for my life.) Knitting was beyond me, though. Somehow, a single crochet hook is easier for me to handle and, more importantly, crochet stitches are more intuitive for me in terms of shaping the item into something three-dimensional.
There's a yarn shop a couple of blocks from the new house and I have a yen to start a new project after I finish unpacking. (So not any time soon.) It will probably be a scarf and hat, since I've moved to the Great White North and making gloves and mittens scares me.
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RE: I have an actual piano music question (sight reading)
I've enjoyed the Classics to Moderns series, too. But if he's more interested in other styles of music, I imagine that at least some published sheet music in most every style is available in easy versions. The more famous it is, the more versions you'll find. Our family enjoys playing Christmas music, so I've got a ridiculous amount of it, and we particularly enjoy the Vince Guaraldi music from A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. For various loved ones at various times, I acquired the Big Note version, the easy version, and a sort of middle-of-the-road version of sheet music from that album. I have played for many years from a harder version that sounds very nice and that I always thought was pretty close to what Guaraldi played, but then I found a version of one that purports to be exactly what he played and it's so far beyond what I can do that I just look at it on my shelf.
My point is that if he determined where he was on the Big-Note-to-Guaraldi scale, he could find a big collection in whatever style that he enjoyed playing and read through it. I made a project during the Covid lockdown of sight-reading through the Early Advanced Classics-to-Moderns book, hoping I found a new-to-me piece that spoke to me. I've been in a long drought as far as finding something new that excited me enough to practice it, but I think I'm going to go back to that effort. Maybe pandemic depression was keeping me from falling in love with new pieces.
Also, my nephew (22) was just here visiting and he was playing some lovely jazz. I asked if he had improvised those pieces or memorized them from sheet music. He said that there were websites with a combination of written music and video recordings that he uses to learn new things. I also know that my granddaughter (13) has taught herself to play the ukulele from YouTube sites. There are probably websites that we have no idea about but that your son's friends could point him to. The internet has something for everybody, so there are probably YouTube channels devoted solely to working on sight-reading.
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RE: Outrageous local specialties
@wtg Does the whitefish hang together through the boiling, or does it end up as more of a stew where the original ingredients blend together?
Sounds delicious, and the communal party of the boiling sounds like a crawfish boil. (Louisiana again.) The crawfish are cooked with sausage, onions, corn on the cob, potatoes, and Old Bay seasoning. (And probably other things I'm not sure about, like beer, cayenne pepper, etc. I don't recall any green solids like bell peppers or celery, though.)
All those things do hang together while cooking, so the traditional way to serve them is to set up tables outside, cover them with newspaper, and then dump the contents of the kettles on the newspaper. People stand or sit around the tables, pick the crawfish out of the shells, and eat the vegetables as side dishes.
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RE: Outrageous local specialties
I nominate New Orleans po boys. My favorite is the fried oyster po boy. Fully dressed, it comes with lettuce, tomato, and remoulade sauce. and it is to die for. They make similar versions with fried shrimp or fried catfish.
My sister's favorite goes in a different direction--roast beef po boys doused with what fancy folk would call au jus. The really good au jus has "trash" in it, the caramelized stuff that gets scraped off the bottom of the pan.
When I was a kid, I loved barbecue ham po boys. I don't remember if they ordinarily come fully dressed, but I got mine with just slices of ham and barbecue sauce. Salty but amazing.
You could eat outrageous local specialties in New Orleans for a month with all the different gumbos, jambalayas, etoufees, and such.
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RE: Edgar Allen Poe's *Tamerlane*
Dennis Lehane's "A Bostonian (in Cambridge)" is a really good short story that involves TAMERLANE AND OTHER POEMS. I've taught it in my mystery class. I found out about it when it appeared in THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE 2022, so it's not just me that thinks it's great.
When I googled it to see if I could find a link where it could be read for free (no such luck), I saw that there are plans to make it a movie.
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RE: Have You Ever Gone Nose-to-Nose With a Deer?
@wtg There are many deer in town. We stayed at an AirBnb a couple of years ago where we regularly woke up to six deer in the small back yard.
Phil met his new vet on Saturday, who immediately scheduled him for the Lyme vaccine, so you are right on target.
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RE: The final departure
Oh, I'm so very sorry. He looks like such a sweet boy!
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RE: Have we done a piano-shopping thread on this forum yet?
@Mik I've never even heard of Persinas. Now I have to go Google...
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RE: Have we done a piano-shopping thread on this forum yet?
@ShiroKuro There's a spot for it on the front wall of the living room, and a smaller spot for it on the front wall of the downstairs guest room. It's just that we have other plans for what to do with that space.
I'll set myself a time-limited sell-it-or-donate-it window and free up the space.
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RE: My experience w local piano movers
My piano is currently on a moving van headed here. We are using a large international line that contracts with piano movers on either end to load and unload. I thought it would be fine.
And it probably is fine, but the process has been nightmarish. At Quirt's urging, I wrote our move coordinator the night before to make sure they were sending the third-party movers to take care of the piano and two large pieces of exercise equipment. I thought, "They're professionals. The third-party people are line items on the contract. Should I have to tell adults to do their jobs?" Well, the answer to that question is often yes, so I did as Quirt suggested. She said, "Yeah, sure, fine, they'll call you to arrange things."
I didn't get a call that night, but I got a call early on the day of the move. I said, "You're coming to load the piano and exercise equipment?" She said yes.
The movers arrived, but the third-party people didn't. At some point, I asked the one woman on the crew if she was the woman I'd talked to. She said, "Yes." So I hadn't spoken with the third-party mover. I called the moving coordinator. Much fussing around ensued with several calls from me. The upshot was that everybody blamed everybody else, but what probably happened is that the guy who quoted the job told the regular movers the correct date, but mistakenly put 7 instead of 6 down for the month on the order for the third-party crew, so they weren't planning to come for 30 more days. Much more fussing around ensued while they figured out whether they could do the job. About lunchtime, they showed up...without a piano board.
I was told not to worry. A regular four-wheeled dolly would be fine. They did seem to know how to do the other stuff--taking off the lid and legs and wrapping it in blankets and such. I called the moving coordinator. She said, "He knows what he's doing." So I watched them wheel my 900-pound beast of a piano out the front door and down a small step and onto the lift, steadying the thing as the lift went up. Then there was a lot of conversation about where to put it in the truck. The man in charge said he'd only ever moved one piano that large, and that they shouldn't lean it against the wall, because if the truck moved in a way that shifted it from vertical, the truck would actually sway and the driver would feel it. (Egad.) He told them where to put it on the truck and what to pack next to it to help keep it upright.
I called and emailed the coordinator and told her, "The third-party movers have got to have a piano board on the other or they will never get it up the eight steps to the front door without it falling over." She said she'd pass that along.
Consider me terrified. But we paid for insuring the load, so they have a lot of incentive to get this right.
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Have we done a piano-shopping thread on this forum yet?
So I've had the C7 more than twenty years now. I've enjoyed the heck out of it. So have my kids and an array of friends and relatives, including some of you. There's technically room for it in the new house, but that's not how we want to use the space. It would either take up more of the living room than we want to sacrifice or I would have to a) find somebody willing to move it up a flight of stairs and b) sacrifice a big chunk of my office to it.
Whatever piano I end up with, I'm planning to put it in my second-floor office and arrange the space so that a few people could gather there for a small piano party or to play chamber music. (A writer's "office" is really just a comfy chair. The rest of the space is for books and whatever. A writing/music room is totally workable.) However, putting a seven-footer in that room would make it difficult to have people in there who aren't me.
So it's time to trade.
However, trading a big piano for a small piano of similar quality at a dealership is like setting $10,000 aflame. (Or, honestly, more.) I do not want to do this.
So what are this group's thoughts about how I should proceed? Should I try to sell my piano privately? I could then buy from a dealership, at least eliminating one side of that money-burning process. Or I could buy privately. If I buy privately, I will need a good tech, but I know that there are people here who will know techs in this area.
If I sell privately, how in the heck do I price it? There is a recent copy of The Piano Book on the moving van headed my way, and it will probably give me some guidance on that. I have been offered so little by dealers both here and in Oklahoma for the C7 as trade, consignment, and outright sale that I don't imagine I can get a whole lot in a private sale, but I can probably get more than what I've been offered...presuming somebody wants a big piano. (Do any of you want a big piano, priced to sell?)
Another option would be to donate it to a school or theater or place of worship and take the tax deduction, which honestly might be a better deal financially than to more or less give it to a dealer. And I'd feel better about it. I've found a place online called PianoFinders that purports to help with that process. Does anybody know anything about them?
Once I'm shed of my treasured musical companion of twenty years--the instrument that brought me here and directly resulted in my finding love and happiness--I can begin the fun process of shopping. I want a very small grand made by a reliable brand, something like a Yamaha C1. My sister may want to sell me her Yamaha GC1, so that is also an option, but I would have to pay somebody to move it here from Boston and I'd have to factor that into the equation. It will be with me for the rest of the time we're able to live independently, so it has to be one I'll enjoy playing. I'm not too worried about missing the sound of the big piano. It'll go in a smaller room, plus it's going into a house built of 140-year-old wood. We'll basically be living in an awesome soundboard.
I'm not sure whether everybody is these days, so I posted at the old board, too.
I know you all have opinions. Tell me what you think!