doing things, mostly foodish
Aug. 4th, 2025 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhen I hit up the dollar store for wax paper for my Ogre gluing, so I wouldn't drip glue on everything, I also picked up a long roll of aluminum foil. For reasons that are unclear to me the grocery store will only sell foil in rolls that are slightly shorter than the short side of a (half-pan) baking sheet.
Normally when I make bacon I do it in the oven, on a baking sheet covered in foil. Normally I have to fold up the edges of the foil manually. Normally some bacon grease leaks out anyway and I have to carefully clean the baking sheet.
This morning I used the long roll of foil, and it covered the entire sheet with overlap on all sides. Near as I can tell no grease leaked through.
It's kind of astounding how having the right tools can improve one's life.
Ogres remaining: one that requires surgery, five more that require colour choice and thought, and three that require both. I'm honestly a little startled that it's almost done. This has been an enjoyable project: it's not so fiddly that I get frustrated at my inability to do fine motor work, and it's producing tangible objects.
This afternoon I decanted the vanilla extract I put up last summer. I'm less optimistic about this. The cinnamon extract I did in the fall was cinnamony enough but also pretty harsh, due I assume to using cheap vodka. Half the vanilla is likewise cheap vodka (though a different kind), so maybe that will turn out alright; the other half is spiced rum, and I have no idea how well that will do. At least it's only a dozen small bottles, instead of the twenty-odd of cinnamon that I need to do something with.
French toast tomorrow morning should give me some indication of quality, at least.
I also spent an hour or so scraping/squeezing "caviar" out of the beans to make vanilla sugar. This was an extremely annoying process that I do not recommend to anyone: removing sticky goop from slick wet beans is not a good time. But I am now prepared to make an awful lot of vanilla sugar. Just need to figure out where I'm storing it. Probably in one of my tall plastic bins: making one smell faintly of vanilla is unlikely to be a downside.
Next steps there are to let the scraped caviar sit until tomorrow so it dries out (possibly with an assist from the oven on low heat), blending it all into a small amount of sugar, and then mixing that into the full amount. The recipe I have calls for "one cup of sugar per vanilla bean". Online varies between one and two cups per bean, so that's a good starting point. Thing is, I undercounted woefully last time; I used eighty vanilla beans in the extract. These are small beans, so, sure, cut that in half. I used forty full beans to make the extract, that's twenty cups of sugar, at 200g a cup that's four kilos of vanilla sugar. That ... should tide me over for awhile. Get some pint or half-pint jars, that's much of xmas sorted.
Then I have the mostly-empty bean pods that I should do something with. I'm currently letting them air dry as well. I guess I could snip them up small and mix them into some (more) sugar.
Onward.
Normally when I make bacon I do it in the oven, on a baking sheet covered in foil. Normally I have to fold up the edges of the foil manually. Normally some bacon grease leaks out anyway and I have to carefully clean the baking sheet.
This morning I used the long roll of foil, and it covered the entire sheet with overlap on all sides. Near as I can tell no grease leaked through.
It's kind of astounding how having the right tools can improve one's life.
Ogres remaining: one that requires surgery, five more that require colour choice and thought, and three that require both. I'm honestly a little startled that it's almost done. This has been an enjoyable project: it's not so fiddly that I get frustrated at my inability to do fine motor work, and it's producing tangible objects.
This afternoon I decanted the vanilla extract I put up last summer. I'm less optimistic about this. The cinnamon extract I did in the fall was cinnamony enough but also pretty harsh, due I assume to using cheap vodka. Half the vanilla is likewise cheap vodka (though a different kind), so maybe that will turn out alright; the other half is spiced rum, and I have no idea how well that will do. At least it's only a dozen small bottles, instead of the twenty-odd of cinnamon that I need to do something with.
French toast tomorrow morning should give me some indication of quality, at least.
I also spent an hour or so scraping/squeezing "caviar" out of the beans to make vanilla sugar. This was an extremely annoying process that I do not recommend to anyone: removing sticky goop from slick wet beans is not a good time. But I am now prepared to make an awful lot of vanilla sugar. Just need to figure out where I'm storing it. Probably in one of my tall plastic bins: making one smell faintly of vanilla is unlikely to be a downside.
Next steps there are to let the scraped caviar sit until tomorrow so it dries out (possibly with an assist from the oven on low heat), blending it all into a small amount of sugar, and then mixing that into the full amount. The recipe I have calls for "one cup of sugar per vanilla bean". Online varies between one and two cups per bean, so that's a good starting point. Thing is, I undercounted woefully last time; I used eighty vanilla beans in the extract. These are small beans, so, sure, cut that in half. I used forty full beans to make the extract, that's twenty cups of sugar, at 200g a cup that's four kilos of vanilla sugar. That ... should tide me over for awhile. Get some pint or half-pint jars, that's much of xmas sorted.
Then I have the mostly-empty bean pods that I should do something with. I'm currently letting them air dry as well. I guess I could snip them up small and mix them into some (more) sugar.
Onward.