Thursday's jazz music: Cool Jazz station on Pandora.
1. While the kitchen was still fairly cool this morning, I started the day making a pot of eggplant and chickpea stew. I found a simple recipe in The New York Times. I made a quick trip to Yoke's to buy the onions and white wine I forgot yesterday. Once home, I chopped up two onions, sauteed them for a few minutes. Meanwhile, I crushed coriander seeds with my mortar and pestle and made a mixture of coriander, cumin, and parprika, added these spices to the onions and then folded in the two eggplants I had chopped. After this cooked for a few minutes, I added white wine, diced tomatoes, and chickpeas and let it all simmer for about 40 minutes.
I tasted the stew while it cooked and decided to add another can of diced tomatoes, some salt, dry basil, and a small amount of red pepper flakes. These were spot on decisions.
After about 40 minutes of simmering, I concluded the stew needed to cook longer, but I didn't want the stove's burner on any longer, so I got out a slow cooker, transferred the stew into it, and let it cook on low for a few hours.
Success! We had some leftover brown rice to put underneath this stew and Debbie and I both savored the stew's texture and tasty blend of flavors.
2. On his poetry broadcast today, Billy Collins continued to read poems from his 1995 collection The Art of Drowning. He read another poem about creating art, "Horizon", followed by the title poem, "The Art of Drowning", and ended with "The Biography of a Cloud", and "Conversion".
Can poems act as fans, cooling the air in a room heavy with late July heat?
Maybe not literally, but Billy Collins, with his dry wit, cool persona, and cunning poems were a welcome relief this afternoon as the heat grew more stifling here in the Idaho Panhandle.
3. Maybe I'm trying to persuade myself I mean it by repeating it so often, but I've been telling Debbie, maybe a little too frequently, that I don't really care that much about winning and losing in the fantasy baseball leagues I belong to -- mainly, I enjoy the way it keeps me paying close attention to what's happening in the major leagues and familiar with the players.
Since Thursday, July 23rd, it's been easy for me to say I'm in it mainly for the fun, because, in the head to head league, my team, the Kellogg Johnniez, have been absurdly successful.
My team in the rotisserie league, the Sunnyside Oddfellowz, on the other hand, have been absurdly terrible and are languishing in the cellar.
So, today, in the head to head league, a handful of my players' teams had a scheduled day off and others didn't play because the Cubs and Reds were rained out.
The Johnniez were shorthanded and the Pinehurst Sluggers crushed them today.
Well, I saw this coming this morning when I realized that the Johnniez would be seriously depleted.
I laughed out loud this morning anticipating the blowout that lay before me today.
When it happened, I laughed some more.
When the Oddfellowz climbed out of the cellar temporarily and then crashed back into it by evening's end, I laughed again.
I can't get worked up about fantasy baseball set backs.
I laugh.
I'm just having fun.
Besides, as the saying goes, the season's still young.
Anything can happen.
(Well, not anything. Mr. Gibbs is not going to become the Chancellor of Germany because Javier Baez hit for the cycle, but you know what I mean.)
Stu helps us celebrate National Avocado Day (July 31) with this limerick:
It’s a fruit with a seed tough to spit!
Gets teased for the size of that pit!
Slice it open to see,
How much to eat there will be.
From the stone to the peel’s what you git!
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