Looking back, the new(ish) foods for 2020 were "summer kiss" melon, pepino melon, and koginut squash. Koginut is a winter squash variety we liked, summer kiss melon is a perfectly nice thing in the honeydew direction, and pepino was boring but food.
An incomplete list of things I did this year, in something resembling temporal order:
- went to New York with @adrian_turtle and @cattitude to see my mother and my aunt Lea. That turned out to be the last time I saw my aunt.
- practiced/learned at least a little French almost every day, via Duolingo. Reached "diamond league," a meaningless ranking that I nonetheless was somewhat motivated by.
- finished indexing a book that I edited in 2019 (my first-ever indexing job, the author's idea rather than mine)
- a lot of text banking, and some phone banking, for candidates in the 2020 elections (mostly Biden/Harris, the Maine senate race, and non-partisan get-out-the-vote efforts that probably reached/motivated more Democratic than Republican voters)
- joined the local Senior Center so I could use the exercise room, which I did once before the pandemic and lockdown in March
- socialized via Discord and Zoom, and got to know some new people through those
- got ice cream delivered regularly
- baked bread from scratch
- had telemedicine appointments with doctors both by phone and with video (over Zoom)
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An old LiveJournal tradition, the first sentence of my first post of each month this calendar year. Nothing terribly interesting here, for better or worse:
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I ordered a koginut squash from What's Good because it's a variety I hadn't even heard of.
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cattitude cooked this for dinner tonight. When he sliced it open, it looked like a very orange acorn squash. He prepared it the way we usually cook squash: halved, baked cut side down, and then when it's almost ready, take it out of the oven, turn it over. put in butter and maple syrup, and bake for a couple of minutes before taking it out of the oven again and serving it.
We both liked it: the flavor is similar to acorn squash but a bit more intense. It's a little stringier (though still not very stringy), and Cattitude notes that the prep was a bit more work, in scraping out the seeds and other stringy bits from the cavity.
We will probably get more of these, if the opportunity presents itself.
cattitude cooked this for dinner tonight. When he sliced it open, it looked like a very orange acorn squash. He prepared it the way we usually cook squash: halved, baked cut side down, and then when it's almost ready, take it out of the oven, turn it over. put in butter and maple syrup, and bake for a couple of minutes before taking it out of the oven again and serving it.We both liked it: the flavor is similar to acorn squash but a bit more intense. It's a little stringier (though still not very stringy), and Cattitude notes that the prep was a bit more work, in scraping out the seeds and other stringy bits from the cavity.
We will probably get more of these, if the opportunity presents itself.
Tags:
- 2020,
- food,
- squash,
- vegetables
On a whim, I ordered a "pepino melon" via Instacart; Wikipedia told me that it's not actually a melon, but tasted somewhat like honeydew and somewhat like cantaloupe, so I expected to enjoy it.
What I hadn't expected was that it wasn't melon-sized, but comparable to a middle-sized mango.
cattitude googled and found advice on how to tell when one is ripe, and how to eat it (raw, with a spoon). According to that, this one was ripe, so he cut it in half after dinner. I took a spoonful, and noticed almost no flavor, maybe a hint of cucumber. Cattitude and adrian_turtle agreed with me that it was bland; after they had a few more spoonfuls, we agreed it wasn't worth eating, and discarded the rest.
Ah, well. I like trying new foods, and don't expect to like all of them. But I regret not ordering a honeydew instead.
What I hadn't expected was that it wasn't melon-sized, but comparable to a middle-sized mango.
cattitude googled and found advice on how to tell when one is ripe, and how to eat it (raw, with a spoon). According to that, this one was ripe, so he cut it in half after dinner. I took a spoonful, and noticed almost no flavor, maybe a hint of cucumber. Cattitude and adrian_turtle agreed with me that it was bland; after they had a few more spoonfuls, we agreed it wasn't worth eating, and discarded the rest.Ah, well. I like trying new foods, and don't expect to like all of them. But I regret not ordering a honeydew instead.
I finished a proofreading job this morning, which was slower and more annoying than I expected given the length and that this is neither a new client nor a new project. I suspect it got less editorial attention than I expect in articles for this client. My contact there did say that, given the pandemic, they aren't worrying about deadlines.
Aloha Hawaiian shirts, from which I have bought one men's cut shirt and a couple of face masks, is now offering a dozen styles in women's sizes, meaning shorter sleeves, which would fit better on me. I emailed to ask them to add one of their space designs to that set.
Our last grocery order included a "cantaloupe" that turned out to be some other variety of melon, with pale green instead of orange flesh and a slightly different flavor. It had a tag saying it was a "summer kiss" melon, with a URL; following that, I now know that it's "native to Israel," by which I think they mean this variety of muskmelon was bred/found there, but not what it's called when not being marketed by a company that has the word "kiss" in all of their melon names.
I am doing a focus group sort of thing, about the election or maybe about political issues. I had thought it was going to be on Zoom, and it turns out to be a web forum, with a "moderator" asking questions and several participants giving answers of varying lengths, about specific issues and about things like "what news sources do you trust?" (I think it's reasonable to say that much here; we weren't asked to keep any of this confidential.) The first session was yesterday, and there will be I think two more sessions, each about three quarters of an hour, and when it's all over they will pay me $150. I've done half a dozen focus groups through this company, the first few when I lived in New York; they don't want to use the same people too often.
Aloha Hawaiian shirts, from which I have bought one men's cut shirt and a couple of face masks, is now offering a dozen styles in women's sizes, meaning shorter sleeves, which would fit better on me. I emailed to ask them to add one of their space designs to that set.
Our last grocery order included a "cantaloupe" that turned out to be some other variety of melon, with pale green instead of orange flesh and a slightly different flavor. It had a tag saying it was a "summer kiss" melon, with a URL; following that, I now know that it's "native to Israel," by which I think they mean this variety of muskmelon was bred/found there, but not what it's called when not being marketed by a company that has the word "kiss" in all of their melon names.
I am doing a focus group sort of thing, about the election or maybe about political issues. I had thought it was going to be on Zoom, and it turns out to be a web forum, with a "moderator" asking questions and several participants giving answers of varying lengths, about specific issues and about things like "what news sources do you trust?" (I think it's reasonable to say that much here; we weren't asked to keep any of this confidential.) The first session was yesterday, and there will be I think two more sessions, each about three quarters of an hour, and when it's all over they will pay me $150. I've done half a dozen focus groups through this company, the first few when I lived in New York; they don't want to use the same people too often.
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