At the grocery store a couple of days ago, we found packages of fresh vegetables for making beef stew. I thought it was brilliant, because it irks me to have to buy, say, a bunch of celery when I only need a couple of stalks.
So today, I decided to make beef stew in the crock pot. I worked today, and wasn't able to start cooking until afternoon. Setting the crockpot on high should have given it plenty of time to cook, but after three and a half hours, the vegetables were still very crunchy. We ended up turning the crockpot to low and going out for Mexican food. By the time we got back home, it was simmering nicely. We'll have to stew for Sunday dinner. It will probably be better the second day, anyway.
I'm wondering now, though, if that crock pot going wimpy, since low seemed to cook hotter than high. It's probably about 15 years old.
Yesterday, I installed an old copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the desktop. I'm trying it out tonight as I write this post. Talking to the computer is not as natural as I thought it was going to be. Even with simple text, I have to stop fairly frequently to make corrections or look up commands. I also don't seem to have a good sense of what the words look like when I'm not actually writing them. That may be something to get used to in time.
After yesterday's melancholy song, today's selection is plumb full up with the confidence of young love. This is the aria from La fille du regiment that earned Pavarotti the nickname "King of the High Cs". Here is is performed by Juan Diego Florez, and he pops out those nine, count 'em, nine Cs like there is nothing to it.
1 comment:
Excellent choice of music. As to crockpots, ours died a planned obsolete death a couple years ago. Annoying. However, being home all the time now, we don't have to rely on slow-cookers for anything ... yet.
Not cold enough here for stew yet.
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