what year is it

it has been such a hectic week. i have a chicken in the pressure cooker, and i could leave that unattended, but there's also brown rice on the stove and i forgot to set a timer and i don't trust it not to burn anyway.
i should really be making a salad though. i'm not. i'm tired. i'm gonna make a salad. in a minute.
the chicken recipe should be crossposting over from tumblr momentarily. i'm doing it with one entire carcass of a culled layer hen, though, so it's like, a scrawny chicken with bones in, so i filled it out with potatoes because as the recipe said, Bengalis put potatoes in everything, and as a woman of Irish extraction I'm feeling solidarity and also there were potatoes in the house and unusually no other vegetables, so.
also we had no star anise OR bay so I had to improvise. There's lovely fresh curry powder my sister made for something else and I just used up, but I also ran out and cut a handful of everything that smelled good in the picking garden, so we'll see how that goes.

I've been running around like an idiot all week, mostly transplanting things but also using a scuffle hoe to weed around the already-planted things. I need to do the flax but it was too wet this morning; maybe this afternoon I can get it with the wheel hoe.

The yurt has been surprisingly watertight, which is good because it's needed to be, I've had rain every single night.

I also went to a meeting of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters last night, with my mother, since my sister is the member but couldn't go with her complicated logistics of parenthood etc. She went to dance lessons with her daughter, and then her mother-in-law was free to go clothes shopping with (my) BIL, which was what she'd wanted to do with him.
So now he owns a bunch of non-farmy clothes, which is a change, and my sister got an evening free of her mother-in-law.
(M-I-L is driving us all crazy, and we're trying to make our plans for next week and she refuses to say whether she's staying or not. Mom and Dad are going on vacation the week after, and would like to know whether they're on the hook for childcare this coming week or not, but if MIL won't plan three days ahead then neither can the rest of us and that's apparently what she wants, she likes the attention. I'd say just go ahead and send Farmkid out to be babysat and tell MIL she can amuse herself however bc since we can't plan around her we can't leave her the grandkid either, and see if that does the trick to offend her into leaving, but whatever, nobody's asking me. I'd've definitely gotten cut out of the will by now if I were her kid, so, who knows.)

Gotta go make that salad. I have, incredibly enough, gotten some writing done this week, but not a ton.

"When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could..."

via http://bit.ly/2HOygeZ

“

When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people. That’s because we use different kinds of land to produce different types of food, and not all diets exploit these land types equally.

Grazing land is often unsuitable for growing crops, but great for feeding food animals such as cattle.
Perennial cropland supports crops that are alive year-round and are harvested multiple times before dying, including a lot of the grain and hay used to feed livestock.
Cultivated cropland is where you typically find vegetables, fruits and nuts.
The five diets that contained the most meat used all available crop and animal grazing land. The five diets using the least amount of meat—or none at all—varied in land use. But the vegan diet stood out because it was the only diet that used no perennial cropland at all, and, as a result, would waste the chance to produce a lot of food.

”

-

Going Vegan Isn’t the Most Sustainable Option for Humanity

(via

platanerx

)

Hunh. I had not considered this.

(via vaspider)

cooking chicken (laziest method)

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walburgablack:

So, the thing is of course there is no such thing as cooking Indian food, because where from and when from and how fancy a meal for, right?

But, standard Sunday chicken curry goes like this in my house, unless my uncle is cooking, in which case it goes really fancy.

You marinade however much you’re cooking, usually about one kilo, with salt, curd, turmeric, red chilli powder. Everything except the salt is optional, though if you leave out the curd you gotta use vinegar instead.

Stick in the fridge for anywhere between two hours to overnight. Longer it marinades the less time actual cooking takes.

Chop three-four onions, fifteen-twenty cloves of garlic, three-five tomatoes, depending on size.

Heat oil in pan/pot/pressure cooker. Add star anise and bay leaf if desired.

Saute onion till translucent/golden.

Saute garlic till golden.

Saute tomatoes till reduced.

Oh, also because Bengalis add potatoes to everything, if you want potatoes (or other vegetable of choice) please add them at this point.

Tip in chicken and saute till golden and letting off liquid.

For gods’ sake, season the food. Salt after tasting to check whether it needs any post-marinade; pepper like whoa, add cream or cheese or basil or coriander or whatever your heart desires.

If you want it dry-ish, brown another five-ten minutes and take off the heat.

If you want a curry, add water and let cook. If cooking in a pressure cooker you can of course force the issue. Two whistles oughta do it.

Doing this again today with a culled laying hen, to see if a more flavorful chicken adds anything to what was a lovely dish the last two or three times I’ve done it. First hitch is that cutting up a laying hen is much more difficult than cutting up a big fat broiler, so the chicken is randomly hacked and literally torn into pieces in some cases, but I didn’t cut any fingers off so I’m taking it as a win. Using the Instant Pot and almost the last of last year’s canned tomatoes, too. So, we’ll see!