Dehydrated peppers, round one. My plan today: pick and dry a lot of basil for the winter.
Also, check out the cabinet doors:
Normally I don't take close-ups of my cabinets, because stuff is always getting spilled down them, and they always look stained and gross. Yesterday I took the bleach sprayer to them, so for now, anyway, they are actually clean. They need repainting --- really, these doors, which are made of particleboard, need replacing. I hate the beveling, which catches every molecule of grime, anyway, but you can also see how it's disintegrating along the edges. Oh well, it's the lived-in look, I guess. At any rate, I'm grateful that the cabinet boxes themselves, and the drawers, are solid wood and sturdy, and that I like the general footprint of my kitchen. I don't see ever doing a gut-renovation in here, thank goodness. But I sure would love someday to have new cabinet doors . . . nice, flat, completely plain cabinet doors. But these at least are clean for now.
Current view, featuring yet another thrifted shower-curtain tablecloth:
Our houseguest comes today, but not until late, around 10 p.m. As he is not a churchgoer, we're planning to go to Mass in our parish this evening, so that tomorrow we can just spend the morning doing a lot of leisurely coffee drinking.
Wearing for the day:
Wool& Sierra dress + thrifted Birk Madeiras for walking. I hope simply to tweak this basic outfit for Mass tonight with a change of shoes and the addition of one of my 7x7 capsule cardigans.
Day 2 hair: a good outcome, even though I haven't refreshed it any, just combed out tangles. I co-washed it with V05, then raked and combed water-emulsified Aussie Hard Freeze gel through it. When it was nearly air-dried, I smoothed over a little more emulsified gel with "praying hands," scrunched again, then diffused it dry. I don't mind not having really defined curls --- I just like that it's shiny and has a lot of volume.
Time now to let the poor dog out of prison.
LATER:
Well, on our walk, the dog, in squatting to pee in some grass, got stung by a bee. She was unhappy and uncomfortable and stressed out by this development, and we weren't far from home, so we turned around and came back here. I gave her a Zyrtec, having ascertained that dogs her size can safely take 10 mg of Zyrtec, and she's chilling in her crate now. I could have done with a longer walk, but maybe later today or this evening we'll manage it. I just figured that we weren't going to have a happy or successful walk as long as she was whipping around every two seconds to examine and lick her poor stung bum.
So now I'm drying basil in the dehydrator. It's really a convection oven, one of those Instant Pot Vortex models, so I had to put all the basil on one perforated rack, then put the other rack over it, to keep the basil from being blown and sucked up into the coils at the top of the oven. I'll probably dry another round of peppers next ---- they've been my most successful crop by far, and the idea of having them available to use all winter, in everything I make that includes peppers, which is a lot of recipes, is making me very happy. I've never been a canner --- I've mostly not had gardens that produced enough to make the work of canning worth it to me --- but DRYING things is exciting. I'm wishing now that I'd dried some of our apples, but we really didn't have that many. Two days' worth of really delicious sweet applesauce, and that was it for the apple crop . . . but we hope to nurture that tree a little more and have a bigger crop next year.
Basil, fortunately, seems to dry pretty fast, a whole heck of a lot faster than peppers do. Three days in the dehydrator for peppers, but I think the basil will be done in a matter of hours. I'd love to have a huge jar of dry basil leaves to use all winter long.
LATER:
Well, the word now is that we're going to Mass in the morning after all, since the husband got home late from a morning engagement and wanted to cut the yard before dark. So . . . hangin' out, dryin' the herbs, readin' the Margery Allingham. Allingham is still not NEARLY as good as Ngaio Marsh, but Albert Campion is kind of fun anyway.