1. I've been keeping an eye on, and occasionally tasting, a batch of ham stock bubbling away in the slow cooker for the last three days or so. The foundation of this stock is the ham bone and fatty meat leftover from when I sliced pieces of this ham for the Still Alive at 65 party. I had cooked that ham over a layer of brown sugar and had coated the meat with more brown sugar. When I removed the ham from the crock pot, I had about a quart of brown sugary ham broth. I saved that broth and, for this stock, I combined celery and onions and water with the ham bone and poured some of the brown sugar ham broth into the stock, slightly sweetening it. Today, I let the stock cool and filled containers and I was very pleased with the results, especially pleased with what the brown sugar broth added. My plan is to buy another small bone in ham sometime this fall, when the weather cools down, and fix ham and navy bean soup.
2. I couldn't see any good reason to go outdoors today. The temperature soared to close to 100 degrees and fires from northeast Washington state and from British Columbia, along with a new fire burning near Wall Ridge Road north of Cataldo made the air smoky and hazy. I got a few things done around the house and did my best to stay cool.
3. I had a great time today working with the pictures I snapped at Coal Creek on Tuesday. From my point of view, it was a photo session of mixed success. It took me a while to get my camera settings right and I probably deleted about a dozen or so of the pictures I took because they were out of focus. But, I took more good pictures than lousy ones and I uploaded a new album of twenty-three pictures to my flickr page. (If you'd like to look at the album, click
here.) Here are three more of the pictures I took on Tuesday while hiking the Coal Creek Trail:
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