Here be adventures

Sitting down for a moment between batches of strawberries.

Aside from the two pints of moldy ones we lost, there are a LOT of bad spots in even the ones that look good. Some even have moldy-grey stuff insiiiiiiiiiide.

Ew.

And one of the jars of juice broke during the processing, but I'm SO thankful it broke in there and not, say, afterwards or before and making a big mess on the floor. I've heard quite a few pops, and it looks like they have all sealed, so that's good. I need to double check again to make sure though.

My chocolate chip purchase of yesterday also afforded me some amusement a little bit ago. I was filling up my bag at the store and thinking, "Ya know, I'm going to be a GOOD girl and get less than I usually do."

Well, I transferred the chips from bag to chip canister this morning and, uh, it's full to the gills as usual. So much for my heroic attempt at self-control.

I think I'm going to make some vegan mac and cheese for lunch using a recipe from a nifty cookbook Frances gave me. (Carpenter, not our neighbour.) It's a nice book because it's actually using healthy stuff to make the substitutes rather than, say, some of the garbitsch that a lot of Adventists stick in their food. Dan and I are both just grossed out at a lot of the meat subsitutes especially and wonder sometimes why, if you've decided you don't want to eat meat, you're so obsessed with meatlike substances still being in your food. The real thing would probably be less injurious to your health. So. Anyway. Going to give this recipe a whirl and see how it goes. It uses cashews instead of soy milk, so we should not have issues with the Overly Sweet problem.

By the way, the soy yoghurt? Interesting. It's not bad, actually, but it tastes really strongly of honey to me. It's sweetened with agave syrup, so maybe that's what I'm tasting. I could probably learn to like it in time, but being not such a huge honey fan and all, it might take a while.

It is nice to be able to get the cultures minus the dairy, though. I blended it with frozen strawberries and then stirred in some chopped fresh strawberries this morning and it was quite palatable despite, as I said, feeling transported back to the days of my childhood when we had friends who would make strawberry ice cream sweetened with ridiculous amounts of honey. *makes face*

Clearly I'm more interested in writing posts to avoid my work right now than getting my work done. Better get busy.

It is such a lovely day outside. We went on a walk after our lunch that we had at, like, two. Took some pictures of the sad condition of the pioneer cemetery and then bought chocolates at the Victorian Chocolate House. Dan has been in there before but I hadn't - it's very small, but the owner has a large selection of chocolates and seems like a friendly guy.

He makes all the candy right there except for the specialty stuff like sugar-free, and he uses the traditional chocolate swirly markings on each piece to denote what type it is - B for boysenberry, A for apple dumpling, C for caramel, single line for something, double lines for another. Quite fascinating. He said lots of people don't do that anymore and each candymaker kind of develops his own code over time because you can't use B for both boysenberry and blackberry, for instance.

It's nice to support local business.

***

And this is the strange cake.

Spot.