{"id":20852,"date":"2017-07-07T12:01:35","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T19:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20852"},"modified":"2017-07-07T12:01:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T19:01:35","slug":"fiddling-in-the-kitchen-while-rome-burns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20852","title":{"rendered":"Fiddling in the Kitchen While Rome Burns"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re having friends over for dinner tonight, my excuse to make braised beef short ribs<\/a>, which we\u00a0haven’t had\u00a0in literally years. I don’t know about where you live, but here we rarely find beef short ribs in the grocery store or base commissary. We get ours at the local butcher shop, where they cut them to the right length for us.<\/p>\n

My recipe involves cooking them for 11 hours at a very low temperature, 200\u00b0F. Since that means they’ll be in the oven\u00a0all day today,\u00a0I did\u00a0the prep work yesterday, browning the ribs and making the wine & beef stock sauce to braise them with. I got up at oh-dark-thirty this morning to pour the sauce over the ribs and get them in the oven at 6 AM. They’ll be done at 5 PM, about an hour before our friends arrive. Donna’s going to make a nice salad to start us off, and I plan to serve the ribs with fingerling potatoes and green beans.<\/p>\n

That’s not all: Donna made flan<\/a>,\u00a0part of which she prepared last night after dinner, then got up\u00a0at\u00a03 AM to finish and put in the fridge to chill. Nothing’s too good for our friends!<\/p>\n

That huge heat wave we had several days ago? It broke for like\u00a0two days, dropping from daytime highs of 118\u00b0F to 105\u00b0F (never thought I’d wish for 105\u00b0, but you can really tell the difference), then came right back. Today’s high will be 110\u00b0. Our dining room’s at the hot end of the house, and I think I might have to go to the corner Ace Hardware for one of those tower fans.<\/p>\n

And of course there’s the house to clean, so we won’t shower up until that’s\u00a0done. After tonight’s dinner\u00a0our social obligation card is blank and we\u00a0can slob out for the rest of the summer, which is all anyone wants to do when it’s this hot.<\/p>\n

\"BurroFire3-D_11pmMDT_July4_2017\"<\/p>\n

The Burro Fire<\/a>\u00a0in the Santa Catalina Mountains a couple of miles from our home has spread to over 26,000 acres and is\u00a0less than 20% contained. The graphic shows what it looked like from the north a few days ago; it’s bigger now, although still confined to the north side of the mountains. We live at the foot of the south side. I’m surprised we don’t see more smoke: we did at first, along with a red glow at night, but now there’s just a gray haze. Firefighters are using Sabino High School, a mile up the road,\u00a0as a base camp.<\/p>\n

The 2003 Aspen Fire<\/a>\u00a0covered much of the same ground and destroyed a lot of cabins and businesses in Summerhaven, the ski village on Mount Lemmon. During that one hot ashes landed\u00a0on our roof and in our yard. Bears and mountain lions came down from the hills and wandered around the hood for a few days (we saw a mountain lion\u00a0cross our yard, but had to take our neighbors’ word on the bears). I don’t think it’ll get that bad this time, but what do I know? We’re told it may rain tomorrow. Even odds on whether that’s a legitimate forecast or preventive panic control on the part of local TV weathermen.<\/p>\n

Links to news I’m following:<\/p>\n

Well, our unelected president has finished\u00a0his sit-down with Putin<\/a>. According to Secretary of State Tillerson, who was in the room, Trump did at least bring up the issue of Russian interference<\/a> in the election. More to come, I’m sure.<\/p>\n

Rachel Maddow<\/a>\u00a0had some interesting things to say last night: apparently someone’s trying to do to her what others did to Dan Rather years ago, when they tricked him\u00a0into basing an expos\u00e9 on (supposedly) faked documents, thus destroying his\u00a0credibility and career. We need Rachel’s\u00a0voice more than ever; while others breathlessly report on the naked emperor’s tweets, she\u00a0digs out the details on Russia’s role in the stolen election and Putin’s power over\u00a0Trump.\u00a0May her spidey sense never fail her.<\/p>\n

I love it that France is going to ban sales of gas- and diesel-fueled cars by 2040<\/a>, and that Volvo will switch to producing only hybrid and electric-powered cars by 2019<\/a>. Oh, and that Tesla’s coming out with an electric-powered tractor-trailer truck this September<\/a>. Waiting now to see what California, a major economic power in the USA and the world, will do next on the automotive & transportation front.<\/p>\n

Just do it, responsible adults leading the way despite the best efforts of right-wing denialists trying to stop you. Just do it. We’ll adjust to electric-powered vehicles and the infrastructure that will come with them. We’ll adapt … we always do.<\/p>\n

So, is that fucking Delaware-sized ice shelf<\/a> ever going to break off? Shades of waiting for Alice the giraffe\u00a0to give birth<\/a>, already!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re having friends over for dinner tonight, my excuse to make braised beef short ribs, which we\u00a0haven’t had\u00a0in literally years. I don’t know about where you live, but here we rarely find beef short ribs in the grocery store or base commissary. We get ours at the local butcher shop, where they cut them to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,15,10,555,2,8],"tags":[2355,2350,2351,2354,2353,2352],"class_list":["post-20852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-cooking","category-current-events","category-local-color","category-personal","category-politics","tag-antarctica","tag-beef-short-ribs","tag-burro-fire","tag-electric-cars-trucks","tag-rachel-maddow-dan-rather","tag-trump-putin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20852"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20862,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20852\/revisions\/20862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}