1. I gladly followed Michael McDonald's recommendation and, this morning, I listened to Rahsaan Roland Kirk's album, Prepare Thyself for a Miracle and to Charles Mingus' Live at Carnegie Hall in which Kirk plays tenor saxophone in Mingus' band. I enjoyed having it on while I was doing my morning routine, but I have no idea how to describe it. It's music I don't have a vocabulary for!
I've been working my way randomly, slowly through poems in The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology. Over the years, I haven't read a lot of Lisel Mueller's poem's, but every time I land on one, I enjoy it. Her poem, "Romantics" appears in this anthology. It's inspired by the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann and pays particular attention to Brahms' Intermezzi. Mueller's love for these Brahms compositions moved me to search for them on YouTube and I discovered that Glenn Gould had recorded an album performing them. Today was my first time listening to the Intermezzi. Lisel Mueller describes them as "sad/and lavish in their tenderness", a perfect description. (By the way, should you decide to follow my lead, the YouTube version I listened to was interrupted often by ads and I am going to either figure out another way to listen to these pieces. Hmm. I guess I could subscribe to YouTube Premium.)
2. I headed to the kitchen early in the afternoon, the snow falling fast, oh fast in Kellogg today, and gathered the ingredients for Morning Glory muffins. I grated a zucchini, grated a McIntosh apple, and grated a couple of carrots and combined these with all the other ingredients. I discovered I'm almost out of all-purpose flour, so I decided I'd see what would happen if I used a combination of almond flour and white whole wheat flour. (I think it worked just fine.)
While combining the ingredients, I listened to one of my favorite cds, Left of Center by my favorite Eugene jam band, Nine Days Wonder. This cd is about twenty-five years old and I just ordered a new copy online as the first one I bought back in the late 1990s had a track that no longer played.
The music fired me up, moved me, and made my already enjoyable baking project even more fun.
The muffins turned out pretty good. The recipe called for 6 oz of applesauce. I had bought 4 oz cups of applesauce and I shrugged and poured two of these cups into the batter. It's possible that my batch of muffins seems a little bit too moist because I used too much applesauce -- if so, I can live with it -- better a little too moist than too dry.
Upon finishing this project, I turned to making a yellow curry sauce with onion, baked tofu cubes, and shrimp. When the sauce was simmering, I decided that I wanted it to be thinner and added chicken stock to it. That move might have made the curry a little less spicy, but when I served myself a bowl of curry poured over Jasmine rice, I liked having a slightly thinner sauce and next time I might use slightly more curry paste so, if I thin the sauce again, it will still have the medium heat level I prefer.
3. I finished baking and cooking and settled into the Vizio room for Game 3 of the World Series. I'd hoped for an old-fashioned pitchers' duel between the Dodgers' Walker Buehler and the Rays' Charlie Morton.
Alas, it didn't happen.
In the top of the first inning, Justin Turner homered off of Morton and in the third and fourth innings the Dodgers put together a string of timely hits, with a rare (these days) safety squeeze play, executed by Austin Barnes, mixed in, and touched up Charlie Morton for five runs.
Walker Buehler, on the other hand, dominated the Rays, with ten strikeouts over six innings and surrendered only one run.
Austin Barnes added a home run to the run he batted in with his squeeze bunt and the Dodgers cruised to a 6-2 win.
I want the Rays to win this series, but I'm not so partisan that I can't appreciate how the Dodgers performed tonight.
While as a fan rooting for the Rays I was disappointed, as a baseball fan I enjoyed seeing the Dodgers score four runs without the aid of a home run. Their singles and doubles were crisp, they had runners scampering from base to base, they pulled off a squeeze play to score a run, and Mookie Betts once again demonstrated his versatility by stealing two bases, a rare feat in this era of analytics informing baseball strategy.
I'm not much at predicting the outcome of sporting events, but it's hard for me to picture the Rays winning this World Series. Saturday night they face Julio Urias whose been lights out in the playoffs and I think Clayton Kershaw might pitch Game 5. I'm not sure what combination of pitchers the Rays will employ in Game 4 and if their Game 5 hurler is Tyler Glasnow, he's a pitcher the Dodgers roughed up in Game 1.
In baseball, you never know, but I'll just say that I think the Dodgers chances of winning their first World Series since 1988 look solid.
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